A new theory explains the mysterious expansion of the universe and why it started accelerating soon after the big bang.
Our universe began with a puzzle. For 100 million years after the big bang, it expanded. Then something strange happened — this expansion suddenly accelerated and has continued to accelerate ever since.
So how might this manifest itself? One possibility is that any stretching of spacetime as it expands makes black holes more massive. An analogous effect is the way the same stretching causes light from the early universe to become red-shifted as it travels through space and time to be observed today.
This growth cannot be explained by the black holes swallowing nearby stars — there aren’t enough of them. Nor cannot it be explained by the merger of supermassive black holes as galaxies collide, since this would not change the mass ratio of nearby stars. It also explains why the accelerated expansion began only after the universe was 100 million years old, a time that cosmologists refer to by its redshift, denoted z. In this case z ∼ 0.7.
One hypothesized explanation for this is that dark matter takes the form of massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs, that float through interstellar space but do not emit much radiation and so are hard to observe. The team go on to make several predictions that could make or break their theory. For example, they say the effect of this black hole-spacetime coupling should have an observable influence on the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the big bang that astronomers have been observing with increasing precision for decades.
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