Black holes are causing universe to expand
These researchers say that Black holes have cores of Dark Energy and it is created and stored inside the black holes.
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Our universe is expanding. The billions of light-years-sized expanse has for a (big) while found a way to take a good stretch. And it continues to amaze us. For centuries we've had our eyes and lenses pointed at the sky to unravel its secrets but the more we know, more we realise how little we know. And like the fleeting horizon, the frontiers of science advance, challenging us to figure out more and more.
A new theory says that Black holes may be responsible for the continued expansion of the universe. Black hole is a fascinating concept in itself. Imagine a thing with beyond crazy gravitational pull that doesn't even let light escape, and you have Black holes! Light travels at the mind-boggling speed of 300,000 kilometres per hour. But it cannot escape the clutches of a Black Hole.
The new theory says that Black holes host Dark Energy, a force that works against gravity and is responsible for the expansion of the Universe.
The universe sprang to life due to The Big Bang. Not the series, but the actual thing. 13.7 billion years ago, in a mother of all imaginable explosions, ALL matter in the universe, trillions and trillions of tonnes of it, got thrown outwards. Celestial processes led to the formation of stars, planets, galaxies, and life!
It was thought that since the Big Bang took place billions of years ago, the effect of outward force would decrease and the expanding universe would start contracting as gravity will pull all the matter together. Simple and logical right?
But scientists observed that the universe continued to expand. And the expansion was even accelerating!
That is to say that instead of the Big Bang's 'force' waning, the Universe appeared to continue on its path of expansion.
This is where Dark Energy comes into play. This energy works counter to gravity and is the reason why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Scientists thought that Dark Energy was 'smeared' all across the universe.
What does the new theory say?
An international team of experts has contested the widely-held belief that Dark Energy is distributed across the universe. These researchers say that Dark Energy may be concentrated in Black holes. In fact, they say that Black holes are the source of Dark Energy.
“We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy,” said Duncan Farrah, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Farrah was quoted by The Guardian.
“This dark energy is produced when normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars.”
Two studies in this regard have been published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
These researchers say that Black holes have cores of Dark Energy and it is created and stored inside the black holes. They posit that these Black holes expand as the Universe itself expands.
“The importance of this work is that it’s taken the theories about black holes with dark energy cores and linked them for the first time to tangible observations of the universe,” said Chris Pearson, a co-author on the study as quoted by The Guardian.
“These black holes are expected to grow in mass as the universe expands.”
Dark Energy
Dark Energy in itself is an enigma. We do not yet know the true nature of it. It works against gravity but we don't know much about it.
If the hypothesis forwarded by the researchers is correct, we may know about the origin, if not the exact nature, of Dark Energy in the universe. That's still one step ahead in understanding one of the elusive and little-known forms of energy in the universe!
There is a 'but'
Like any scientific idea, the theory that Dark Energy forms inside Black holes has its critics.
“There are most likely more mundane explanations,” says Vitor Cardoso, a Physics professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, as quoted by The Guardian.
“The relation this work investigates between black hole mass and universe expansion rate is somewhat naive…and not supported on fundamental principles.”
“What this study could also say is something as simple as ‘black holes evolve differently today than they did billions of years ago’,” he added. “It’s much, much too early to think that black holes are in any way related to dark energy.”
To their credit, the researchers who have carried out the study, agree that more work and even criticism is needed to refine and crystallise the idea that Dark Energy forms inside of Black holes.
"We certainly haven’t proved anything here,” says Duncan Farrah.
“The evidence makes this idea worthy of scrutiny and further test, but it will take a lot more work to confirm or refute it.”
It is impossible for us to 'enter' a Black Hole to examine the presence and effects of Dark Energy as the unimaginably high gravity of the Black Hole will literally shred our bodies and turn them into spaghetti in a process called 'Spaghettification'.
We, therefore, have our observations, theories and lively exchange in our scientific community to make the Universe reveal this secret and many more.
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