![]() In younger galaxies, black holes can grow by swallowing nearby stars and other material, but in the older galaxies, there is little left for them to suck in. In the latest work, researchers compared black hole masses in young galaxies, where stars are still forming, with black hole masses in giant but dormant galaxies, where no more stars are born. He introduced it as a fix in general relativity to keep the universe from collapsing, but later ditched it, calling it his “greatest blunder”. In its simplest form, dark energy matches the “cosmological constant” that Einstein came up with in 1917. The discovery posed a problem for astronomers, however: given that gravity should be slowing the expansion, what could be driving it faster?Īs a placeholder for a solution, researchers came up with dark energy, an unknown force that works against gravity. ![]() Scientists first proposed dark energy in the late 1990s when measurements of distant stars revealed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. “There’s a number of counter-arguments and facts that need to be understood if this claim is going to live more than a few months,” said Vitor Cardoso, a professor of physics at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. The claim was met with raised eyebrows from some independent experts, with one noting that while the idea deserved scrutiny, it was far too early to link black holes and dark energy. “This dark energy is produced when normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars.” “We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy,” said Duncan Farrah, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Instead of dark energy being smeared out across spacetime, as many physicists have assumed, the scientists suggest that it is created and remains inside black holes, which form in the crushing forces of collapsing stars.
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