It means there is no need to conceive of some external force causing the universe to expand, and it does away with the requirement that black holes contain singularities, which remain a thorny problem in physics. While this discovery is certainly mind-blowing, it actually fits neatly into existing models of the universe. Ultimately, the team found the coupling strength to be around 3.11, and they ruled out the possibility of zero coupling at 99.98% confidence." Vacuum energy stems from the idea that, rather than a vacuum being a total void, it actually has a complex structure on the quantum scale.Īs an American Astronomical Society blog on the new research explains: "Traditional singularity-containing black holes would have a coupling strength of 0, while vacuum-energy black holes would have a coupling strength of 3. What this idea assumes is that instead of a singularity, black hole interiors contain vacuum energy. Typically, black holes are envisioned as containing a singularity, where even gravity breaks down. This conclusion requires us to think of black holes a little differently than we normally might. "We thus propose that stellar remnant black holes are the astrophysical origin of dark energy," the authors wrote in the study. This, the researchers wrote, is known as "cosmological coupling." The researchers also found that the black holes were getting more massive in relative lockstep with the expansion of the universe. The researchers found that black holes embedded in ancient galaxies that formed in the early universe-which are now dead, and thus don’t form new material to feed their black holes-were more massive than could be explained by the traditional methods of growth, which are eating stars and merging with other black holes. The key to the discovery was tracking the rate of black hole growth relative to their position in the history of the universe. “If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we've got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years," study co-author Chris Pearson, from RAL Space in the UK, said in a statement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |