Black holes are the source of dark energy that is causing expansion of the universe, study says

Black holes are the source of dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, says a new study. This claim comes from an international team that compared growth rates of black holes in different galaxies. The team concluded that the spread of the masses observed could be explained by black holes bearing cores of ‘dark energy’, a report by the Guardian said.

Seventeen researchers in nine countries sharedtheir findings in two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. One of the researchers, Duncan Farrah from the University of Hawaii, said, "We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy." Farrah added that this dark energy is produced when the normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars, the Guardian report added.

The researchers said the findings could be explained if black holes grow as the universe expands. They said that observations found black holes expanding 10 orders of magnitude in mass across most of cosmic history.

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"The Kerr black hole solution is, however, provisional as its behaviour at infinity is incompatible with an expanding universe. Black hole models with realistic behaviour at infinity predict that the gravitating mass of a black hole can increase with the expansion of the universe independently of accretion or mergers, in a manner that depends on the black hole's interior solution," the research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters said.

The researchers compared black hole masses in young galaxies with black hole masses in giant but dormant galaxies. In the younger galaxies, black holes can grow by swallowing nearby stars and other material. However, in the older ones, there is little left for them to suck in. They also found that black holes in dormant galaxies were seven to 20 times more massive than expected,a finding they say points to another process by which the black holes are growing.

“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 of the study who is also the Astronomy Group Leader at STFC RAL Space in Oxfordshire.

However, the claim that black holes are the source of dark energy was met with disapproval from some experts. Vitor Cardoso, a professor of physics at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, said, there are manycounter-arguments and facts that needed to be understood if this claim was going to live more than a few months. “What this study could also say is something as simple as black holes evolve differently today than they did billions of years ago,” Cardoso said, adding it was too early to think black holes are related to dark energy in any way.

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