Black Holes Could Be The Enigmatic Force Expanding The Cosmos

From the winding down of clocks to the demise of stars, everything seems fated to ultimately grind to a halt. But there’s one really, really colossal thing to which this doesn’t seem to apply, at all. That’s the Universe itself, getting bigger and bigger all the time. According to our physical descriptions of how the universe should behave, that growth should be decelerating down. Instead, measurements show it is accelerating, driven by an enigmatic force known as dark energy.  There’s something in the Cosmos that might explain it, some researchers argue: the enormous, dense, growing concentrations of matter known to us as black holes. “If black holes contain dark energy, they can couple to and grow with the expanding universe, causing its growth to accelerate,” astronomer Kevin Croker of Arizona State University says. “We can’t get the details of how this is happening, but we can see evidence that it is happening.”

We are unaware what it is, but calculations suggest whatsoever is responsible for the accelerated expansion it makes up an estimated 70 percent of the matter-energy distribution of the Universe. What we see as expansion currently also may not have always been consistent. According to contemporary theory, an early period of growth in the universe was the period of inflation. Immediately after the Big Bang, the Cosmos went from nothing to a considerably large something in a fraction of a second. Then it grew comparatively slowly for a time, until roughly 5 billion years ago when expansion became dominated by dark energy.

Whatever caused the Cosmos to initially inflate, slow, and accelerate had to overcome the immense gravity confined within a cosmic sum of matter squeezed into one spot. “If you ask yourself the question, ‘Where in the later Universe do we see gravity as strong as it was at the beginning of the Universe?’ the answer is at the center of black holes,” explains University of Michigan physicist Gregory Tarlé. “It’s possible that what happened during inflation runs in reverse, the matter of a massive star becomes dark energy again during gravitational collapse – like a little Big Bang played in reverse.”

The notion that black holes might be implicated in dark energy emerges from a fairly recently proposed concept called cosmological coupling, a proposal that emerges from efforts to settle black hole weirdness with interpretations of general relativity. According to the proposition, the extreme distortions of space linked with black holes is connected, or coupled, to the expansion of the Cosmos. As the Cosmos grows, so too do black holes; and as black holes grow, so does the Cosmos.