An artist's illustration of a black hole
For a long time, scientists have believed in the inflationary universe theory which states that almost 14 billion years ago, at the start of the Big Bang, a mysterious energy, believed to be 'dark energy' accelerated the expansion of the infant universe. Now, a radical new study has claimed that dark energy may have some connection to black holes with the latter responsible for driving the never-stopping growth of the cosmos. The study published in Journal of Cosmology on Monday (Oct 28) posits that studying black holes could reveal the conditions which led to the emergence of dark energy.
Gregory Tarle, professor of physics at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study, alongside colleagues from five institutions analysed data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) -- made up of 5,000 robotic eyes mounted on the Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, US to make the correlation.
"If you ask yourself the question, 'Where in the later universe do we see gravity as strong as it was at the beginning of the universe?' the answer is at the centre of black holes," said Tarle.
"It's possible that what happened during inflation runs in reverse, the matter of a massive star becomes dark energy again during gravitational collapse-like a little Big Bang played in reverse."
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Using DESI data of tens of millions of galaxies, the scientists gathered evidence that the density of dark matter increased over time which agrees with how the amount and mass of black holes increased as the universe aged.
"The two phenomena were consistent with each other - as new black holes were made in the deaths of massive stars, the amount of dark energy in the universe increased in the right way," said co-author Duncan Farrah.
"This makes it more plausible that black holes are the source of dark energy."
Scientists believe that the findings of the study could lead to a renewed understanding of the universe and the true composition of black holes.
"Fundamentally, whether black holes are dark energy, coupled to the universe they inhabit, has ceased to be just a theoretical question. This is an experimental question now," Tarle said.