Could black holes be the secret engine driving our universe's expansion?
In short: Dark energy makes up roughly 70% of the universe, yet its true nature remains one of science's greatest mysteries. A provocative new theory suggests that this mysterious force might actually be born from the collapse of massive stars, creating a cosmic cycle where matter transforms back into the energy that fuels expansion.
The prevailing inflationary universe theory posits that a mysterious energy drove the exponential expansion of the infant universe nearly 14 billion years ago, producing all known matter. This ancient energy shares key features with the current universe's dark energy. However, scientists still lack a definitive explanation for what dark energy is, despite it constituting the majority of the universe's composition.
Research appearing within the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics investigates a method involving the reversal of this phenomenon. Researchers suggest that when massive stars collapse to form black holes, the matter becomes dark energy again—effectively acting like a 'little Big Bang' played in reverse. Evidence suggests that black hole cores possess gravitational intensity comparable to the initial moments of cosmic existence.
Data from the first year of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey provides evidence for this link. The DESI instrument, featuring 5,000 robotic eyes on the Mayall telescope, measured tens of millions of distant galaxies to track expansion speeds. The findings show that the density of dark energy has increased over time, a trend that aligns with the historical increase in the mass and number of black holes.
If black holes do contain dark energy, they could couple with and grow alongside the expanding universe, causing the expansion to accelerate. While the specific mechanics of this interaction are not yet fully understood, the correlation between black hole growth and dark energy density provides a compelling new framework for resolving the crisis in cosmology.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The CRISIS IN COSMOLOGY solved with black holes as dark energy?! Night Sky News November 2024
- Also: Evidence mounts for dark energy from black holes
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