UNITED STATES: Supermassive black holes are the worst thing ever, but some scientists think the giant objects discovered at the centre of many galaxies may be what’s causing the universe to expand.
An international team that examined the growth rates of black holes in many galaxies made the startling claim. They come to the conclusion that black holes with “dark energy” cores, the unknown force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion, could account for the observed distribution of masses.
Scientists propose that dark energy is formed and persists inside black holes, which arise as a result of the crushing forces of collapsing stars, as opposed to being spread out across spacetime as many physicists have assumed.
Researchers proposed dark energy, an enigmatic force that opposes gravity, as a stand-in for a solution. Dark energy essentially fits the “cosmological constant” that Einstein proposed in 1917. In order to prevent the cosmos from collapsing, he added it to general relativity as a repair but later abandoned it, calling it his “greatest blunder.”
In the most recent study, researchers compared black hole masses in massive but dormant galaxies, where no new stars are created, with black hole masses in young galaxies, where stars are actively developing. Black holes can expand by ingesting neighboring stars and other matter in early galaxies, but there isn’t much left for them to suck in in older galaxies.
The researchers discovered that the black holes in sleeping galaxies were seven to twenty times more massive than anticipated, suggesting another mechanism at work for the black holes’ growth.
According to the researchers, the findings could be explained if black holes expand with the cosmos, as they claim in two publications that were published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. According to the authors, black holes containing dark energy in their centres may exhibit this behaviour.
If the researchers are right, they will have unlocked the mystery surrounding one of the universe’s most enigmatic forces’ origins, if not its nature. But much more work must be done before it can become popular.
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