Researchers have strengthened the case that matter becomes dark energy when massive stars collapse and become black holes.
Almost 14 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the Big Bang , a mysterious energy drove an exponential expansion of the infant universe and produced all known matter, according to the prevailing inflationary universe theory.
"If black holes contain dark energy, they can couple to and grow with the expanding universe, causing its growth to accelerate" said Kevin Croker, lead author of the team's new study and an assistant research scientist at Arizona State University."We can't get the details of how this is happening, but we can see evidence that it is happening."
"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 Duncan Farrah, associate professor of physics at the University of Hawai'i and co-author of the study."This makes it more plausible that black holes are the source of dark energy."
"This occurs much later in the universe and is informed by recent measurements of black hole production and growth as observed with the Hubble and Webb space telescopes," said co-author Rogier Windhorst, an interdisciplinary scientist for the JWST and professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University.
Regardless of what those future observations bring, the work happening now represents a sea change in dark energy research, the team said.
Black Holes Dark Matter Astronomy Cosmology Big Bang Stars Galaxies
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