CNN Indonesia
Sunday, 19 Feb 2023 09:34 WIB
Black holes are thought to be the culprits of the accelerating expansion of the universe. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Black hole ‘monster’ size is suspected to be the culprit of the accelerated expansion Universe. How to?
Astronomers have found clues that the giant black hole at the heart of the majority of large galaxies may be a source of dark energy.
Launch LiveSciencethey found after comparing giant black holes across nine billion years of cosmic history.
Dark energy itself is a mysterious force that composes 68 percent of the known universe and causes its expansion.
This comparative study has been published in Astrophyisical Journal by title A Preferential Growth Channel for Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies at z ≲ 2.
“If this theory is correct, it will revolutionize the whole of cosmology because we are finally getting to the solution and origin of dark energy which has puzzled cosmologists and theoretical physicists for 20 years,” wrote one of the authors of the study, Chris Pearson who is also an astrophysicist at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
The Big Bang theory, which is considered the most valid in terms of the creation of nature, says that the universe started with a big explosion from a very small point. The universe then expands rapidly and then gradually decreases its speed.
Over the past century, astronomers have found that the Universe is expanding faster than ever before.
This is somewhat surprising because gravity is predicted to slowly crush the cosmos together in an event called the Big Crunch.
To counter that, we need a neutralizing gravity that pushes all objects in the universe farther apart. Astronomers call this neutralizing gravity dark energy.
That dark energy has to be available in tremendous amounts to be the neutralizer that makes up most of the universe. Unfortunately until now, that dark energy was nowhere to be seen.
But recent studies seem to be starting to find clues about the phenomenon. Experts compare the mass of the two black holes at the center of the two galaxies.
One of the black holes is young and remote, with light reaching Earth dating back nine billion years. Meanwhile, one black hole is older and only a few million light years from Earth.
As a result, astronomers found that the giant black hole has expanded to seven to 20 times its original size.
This cannot be explained by simple theories that call black holes swallowing stars or colliding with each other and merging.
Because of this, experts put forward the hypothesis that black holes grow in tandem with the Universe. They manage to escape the light-trapping and star-destroying forces that reside in their core, through something called vacuum energy.
The vacuum energy also causes the black holes to expand outwards and somehow drags the entire fabric of the cosmos with them.
“This is somewhat surprising. We started to observe how black holes develop and may find the answer in one of the biggest problems in cosmology,” said another study co-author, David Clements, an astrophysicist from Imperial College London.
If there really is expansive energy in the core of a black hole, it would solve a long-standing puzzle facing Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. First, it will explain how the Universe doesn’t crash into each other because of the gravitational pull.
Second, it would remove the need for singularities (giant gravitational states where the laws of physics collapse) to explain how the black hole’s dark core works.
(lth)
