The conclusion reached by a team of 17 researchers from nine countries, led by the University of Hawaii and including Imperial College London and STFC RAL Space physicists, suggests that dark energy is generated by black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity theory. The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show that black holes are expanding faster than expected, which corresponds to a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity. This energy is linked to a concept proposed by Einstein but later abandoned: a “cosmological constant” that opposes gravity and prevents the universe from collapsing. The primary component of hoover (Absorbed, contained – note from redaction) energy is a type of energy contained within spacetime itself, known as hoover energy, which pushes the universe apart, accelerating its expansion. However, black holes posed a problem—their extremely strong gravity is hard to oppose, especially at their centres, where everything seems to break down in a phenomenon called a ‘singularity’.
Source: Black Hole Image Makes History by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0
The study’s findings have the potential to revolutionise our cosmology knowledge by accounting for dark energy and the acceleration of the universe. A study of nine billion years of black hole evolution concluded that black holes gain mass in a way consistent with them containing hoover energy, thereby providing a source of dark energy and eliminating the need for singularities to form at their centres. When massive stars die, supermassive black holes form, containing millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun inside them.
The team examined data spanning nine billion yards to see if these effects alone could account for the growth of supermassive blackholes. When distant galaxies (when they were young) were compared to local elliptical galaxies (when they were old and dead), the observed growth was much larger than predicted by accretion or mergers.
Chris Pearson and his colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, UK, compared clusters of galaxies with black holes at their centres. They calculated that the black holes grew in mass by 7—20 times in the past nine billion years, which cannot be explained fully by stellar absorption or mergers with other galaxies. Pearson proposed that black holes contain hoover energy, a type of energy that exists everywhere in space due to quantum particles vanishing and reappearing (…). This is the first observational proof that black holes contain hoover energy and are ‘coupled’ to the expansion of the universe, increasing in mass, a phenomenon known as cosmological coupling. Duncan Farrah, a University of Hawaii astronomer and former Imperial Ph.D. student, states:
“We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy.”
Source: https://iopscience.iop.org
Pearson believes that more galaxy observations or examination of signatures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) could strengthen the explanation. More evidence could be obtained by measuring the rate at which black holes merge, which is also affected by their dark energy nature. Andy Taylor of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom warns that more observational data is required before we can prove that black holes are the source of dark energy.
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