Black holes are Dr Becky area of expertise and she does not buy the recent Black Hole – Dark Energy theory. Dr Becky describes the work of the two papers where they looked only at globular galaxies so that they could eliminate galaxy and black hole mergers for black hole growth. They plotted the size of black holes in globular galaxies over time to find excess growth in the galaxies.
However, Dr Becky specializes in Black Hole growth and reviewing her own work and the literature to show that Black Holes mainly grow (70%+) with accretion of mass and not through mergers. The work does not eliminate the other methods of Black hole growth, so the observed growth cannot be attributed to universal expansion increasing vacuum energy.
Dr Becky Smethurst is an award-winning astrophysicist and science communicator at the University of Oxford.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Excellent discussion by Dr Becky. Her caveats, plus the observational fact that dark energy is everywhere, everywhen, but black holes are small fractions of the cosmos, means there’s a whole load of observational work required to settle the question.
Dr Sabine Hossenfelder also criticized the research and in fact, criticized even the notion of dark energy, which she considers just Spacetime curvature coming from a constant, not made of anything
Dark energy always seemed like a bizarre theory