First Evidence that Black Holes are the Source of Dark Energy

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Observations of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies point to a likely source of dark energy – the ‘missing’ 70% of the Universe.

​The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein’s theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the Universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.

Study co-author Dr Chris Pearson, from STFC RAL Space, said: “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.”

The new result shows that black holes gain mass in a way consistent with them containing vacuum energy, providing a source of dark energy and removing the need for singularities to form at their center.

​​​Black hole growing pains
The conclusion was made by studying nine billion years of black hole evolution. Black holes are formed when massive stars come to the end of their life. When found at the centres of galaxies, they are called supermassive black holes. These contain millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun inside them in a comparatively small space, creating extremely strong gravity.

Black holes can increase in size by accreting matter, such as by swallowing stars that get too close, or by merging with other black holes. To discover whether these effects alone could account for the growth of supermassive black holes, the team looked at data spanning nine billion years.

The researchers looked at a particular type of galaxy called giant elliptical galaxies, which evolved early in the Universe and then became dormant. Dormant galaxies have finished forming stars, leaving little material for the black hole at their center to accrete, meaning any further growth cannot be explained by these normal astrophysical processes.

Comparing observations of distant galaxies (when they were young) with local elliptical galaxies (which are old and dead) showed growth much larger than predicted by accretion or mergers: the black holes of today are 7—20 times larger than they were nine billion years ago.

​​​​Cosmological coupling
Further measurements with related populations of galaxies at different points in the Universe’s evolution show good agreement between the size of the Universe and the mass of the black holes. These show that the measured amount of dark energy in the Universe can be accounted for by black hole vacuum energy.

This is the first observational evidence that black holes actually contain vacuum energy and that they are ‘coupled’ to the expansion of the Universe, increasing in mass as the Universe expands – a phenomenon called ‘cosmological coupling’. If further observations confirm it, cosmological coupling will redefine our understanding of what a black hole is.

Study first author Duncan Farrah, University of Hawai`i Astronomer and former Imperial PhD student, said: “We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy.

“What that means, though, is not that other people haven’t proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we’re not adding anything new to the Universe as a source for dark energy: black holes in Einstein’s theory of gravity are the dark energy.”

The Astrophysical Journal – A Preferential Growth Channel for Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies at z ≲ 2

Abstract
Observations have found black holes spanning 10 orders of magnitude in mass across most of cosmic history. The Kerr black hole solution is, however, provisional as its behavior at infinity is incompatible with an expanding universe. Black hole models with realistic behavior at infinity predict that the gravitating mass of a black hole can increase with the expansion of the universe independently of accretion or mergers, in a manner that depends on the black hole’s interior solution. We test this prediction by considering the growth of supermassive black holes in elliptical galaxies over 0 < z ≲ 2.5. We find evidence for cosmologically coupled mass growth among these black holes, with zero cosmological coupling excluded at 99.98% confidence. The redshift dependence of the mass growth implies that, at z ≲ 7, black holes contribute an effectively constant cosmological energy density to Friedmann's equations. The continuity equation then requires that black holes contribute cosmologically as vacuum energy. We further show that black hole production from the cosmic star formation history gives the value of ΩΛ measured by Planck while being consistent with constraints from massive compact halo objects. We thus propose that stellar remnant black holes are the astrophysical origin of dark energy, explaining the onset of accelerating expansion at z ∼ 0.7. Astrophysical Journal Letters – Observational Evidence for Cosmological Coupling of Black Holes and its Implications for an Astrophysical Source of Dark Energy

38 thoughts on “First Evidence that Black Holes are the Source of Dark Energy”

  1. “What prevents the density to become infinite?”

    We don’t understand mass without being matter, space being one point only (and not 3-4 dimensional, at least) and can not accept violation of 2nd law of thermodynamics.
    What requirement needs infinite mass and not only (for human experience and intellectual grasp) very huge masses/exponential accumulation of matter (depending on it being massive black holes to SMBH with varying singularities considering its concentrated/collapsed masses)?
    Does a collapsing agglomeration of matter require or produce net energy output ( from star to white dwarf, neutron star or BH, new forms of theoretical objects (QBHO) not even verified in theory(?) might add gravastars – gravitational vaccum star, special types with mass concentrated within a sphere, not at centres like for BHs – or holostars(?) )?
    What are energy balances for a BH from forming until annihilation to an hypothetical “end of time”/static universe “Big Freeze” (what is only one theory, beside re-contracting space to “Big Crunch” or a universe getting hot, accelerated space extension to “Big Rip” or combinations within “Big Bounce” for repetition from “Big Bang” and “Big Crunch”, “Big Slurp”, “Cosmic uncertainty”)?

    • A 2010 analysis of entropy states, “The entropy of a general gravitational field is still not known”, and “gravitational entropy is difficult to quantify.”

      (With even not knowing if “Universe” is a closed or open system, considering conservation of mass/energy/information(->@”endOfTime.BigFreeze”)?)

  2. Where does it say dark energy is produced in SMBHs? It just states that the expansion of the universe and the gain of weight correlate and there’s no other explanation.(dark matter would never contribute enough mass to explain how this things grow so big).

  3. If I understand the source article right, there’s a coupling but nowhere does it say dark energy is produced in SMBHs, just that the expansion of the universe and the gain of weight correlate and there’s no other explanation.(dark matter would never contribute enough mass to explain how this things grow so big).

  4. If I understand the source article right, there’s a coupling but nowhere does it say dark energy is produced in SMBHs, just that the expansion of the universe and the gain of weight correlate and there’s no other explant (I looked at estimates and dark matter would never contribute enough mass to explain how this things grow so big).

  5. If I understand the source article right, there’s a coupling but nowhere does it say dark energy is produced in SMBHs, just that the expansion of the universe and the gain of weight correlate and there’s no other explant (I looked at estimates and dark matter would never contribute enough mass to explain how this things grow so big).

  6. Not a physicist but more of a person curious in possibilities and suppositions. So if supermassive black holes do not need (or have) singularity, and possibly vacuum energy (zero potential) accounts for the missing 70% of the (our) universe, and if the phenomena of paired coupling and entanglement scales at plank and macro levels, is it possible that the so-called missing mass of the (our) universe is really “shared” or “loaned” to another of the multiverses that the vacuum energy transfers to and from?

  7. if gravity bends light and warps space time, the redshift seen by telescopes that indicate and expanding universe may be caused by the gravity of all matter, not expansion and dark energy.

    • If we are not the Centre of expansion we (then) should recognize shares of our surroundings with blueshift (densification of wavelength) also, (as long expansion not reaches speed of light, otherwise there’s no energy/information anymore through Photons and surroundings appear dark/lightless)?

  8. This is just the macro version of the micro (quantum) concept of ‘collapse’-and-expand of Bell’s inequality. That is, the determination of an aspect of complimentary relation, such as position or velocity, necessarily corresponds with the wave-like expansion of the other conjugated attribute—it’s undeterminability, expansion of wave-like potential.
    So, in the macrocosm, the ‘uncollapsed’ (or symmetric) space/time relation of ‘vacuum’ (or potential) energy may similarly asymmetricize, or ‘collapse’, with the equivalent corresponding expansion—a system level conservation.

  9. This idea is old.
    This is just the macro version of the micro (quantum) concept of ‘collapse’-and-expand of Bell’s inequality. That is, the determination of an aspect of complimentary relation, such as position or velocity, necessarily corresponds with the wave-like expansion of the other conjugated attribute—it’s undeterminability, expansion of wave-like potential.
    So, in the macrocosm, the ‘uncollapsed’ (or symmetric) space/time relation of ‘vacuum’ (or potential) energy may similarly asymmetricize, or ‘collapse’, with the equivalent corresponding expansion—a system level conservation.

  10. “…black holes gain mass in a way consistent with them containing vacuum energy…”

    I’m making an assumption here. If they are saying mass increases this way then really they are saying it is making matter but they want to confuse people with terminology so they are calling it vacuum energy. I read this is the stress is making pair production from the vacuum, making matter. So here’s the question. If “vacuum energy” is making matter. For every positive proton made a antiproton should be made. The same for electrons. Where is all the anti-matter mass going?

    If you are interested in how matter can instantly be created, not fake stuff or voodoo, real physics, then look at this guys page and scroll down to,

    “… But in my 50-year career as a Physicist, beginning in 1963, as a lowly Physics student at the University of Chicago, I have witnessed as many as 35 separate “Pair Production Experiments” where a “photon” (a nothing, just energy!) can spontaneously disappear and a “matched pair” of electron and anti-electron suddenly appear. (which allegedly happens to have OPPOSITE nuclear spin, which Conserves Angular Momentum!) We Physicists SEE that BOTH of the new particles DO come into existence simultaneously.

    Pair Production Experiment Magnetic Field Photo…”

    https://mb-soft.com/index.html

    and explanation

    True Origin of the Universe

    https://mb-soft.com/fourunivv.html

    Why they don’t teach that this is even a possibility I don’t understand. BTW this guy has some extremely good ideas and some I think not so good.

    • If that were the case, we would expect to see as many galaxies made up of antimatter as we see galaxies made of matter, though. After all, “pair production” implies that for every proton, there is an antiproton somewhere. And if a galaxy entirely made up of anti-atoms were exactly the same as a galaxy made of matter, then we could say that perhaps they are. But then we’d expect to see mass annihilation on half of all galaxy collisions, and we have never seen such a thing.

      So pair production, while a real thing, doesn’t explain the mass that exists in the Universe. Much less it explains the accelerating expansion of the Universe, since more electron-positron pairs in existence would contribute more towards slowing the expansion of the Universe, not accelerating it.

  11. Ok, I’m more interested in the assertion that black holes containing dark energy eliminate the need for a singularity. The whole point of a black hole was that something needed to form to causally isolate singularities. What in the world is the structure of a black hole if there isn’t a singularity at the centre of it? What causes gravity to top off? This is, I think, the bigger question if this model turns out to reflect reality.

    • I’m not sure what you mean by, “The whole point of a black hole is to isolate singularities”; Singularities aren’t necessary for a black hole, just enough mass that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. For all we know new physics we’re unaware of kick in and result in a new form of matter at ultra high densities that can avoid continued collapse. (The new physics would have to involve changing the speed of light, of course.) Even under present physics the event horizon is there as soon as all the matter is inside of it, even if it hasn’t had time yet to reach the center.

      Even before we were aware that neutron stars couldn’t be stable over a certain mass limit, physicists were aware that if you dumped enough matter in one spot, light couldn’t escape, and that’s a “black hole”. It was a while after that they figured out that anything that dense HAD to collapse, because the forces that would be preventing the collapse couldn’t propagate outwards.

      But black holes predates singularities.

      • Here is an excerpt of the Wikipedia page for black holes, subsection “General relativity” in section “History”:

        In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, (…) a few months later, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations that describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass. (…) This solution had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it became singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. In 1924, Arthur Eddington showed that the singularity disappeared after a change of coordinates[, and] this meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild radius was a non-physical coordinate singularity. Arthur Eddington did however comment on the possibility of a star with mass compressed to the Schwarzschild radius in a 1926 book…

        In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated, using special relativity, that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass (now called the Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M☉) has no stable solutions. [A] white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star, which is itself stable. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that neutron stars above another limit (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) would collapse further for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.

        Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#General_relativity

        As you can see, the concept of black hole was first proposed to explain the consequences of the gravitational collapse above a certain limit; if now someone comes along and says “now this deletes the need for a singularity,” then someone has to explain what happens when a star surpassing the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit collapses and why exactly the density at the centre of the black hole does not go to infinity.

        There was a theory which I have seen put forward that, as the star collapses, time dilation makes it so that the collapsing star never actually makes it into a black hole before the end of time, and that could be invoked as a solution for this problem. I have never seen this interpretation specifically refuted, however, which means that it may be something so profoundly stupid that it does not even rise to the level of needing refutation (at least for a professional physicist); or it may be on the money, but it does not meet the criteria of “elegance” which seems to drive so much theory in Physics nowadays.

          • It may be “elegant,” it may not be, but the issue is that the assertion that singularities are “unneeded” is, on its face, troubling. Singularities weren’t postulated because they were “elegant,” they were postulated because there is a density beyond which no known mechanism can counteract gravitational collapse. Stars above a certain mass will certainly collapse into a body with a density above this limit. What prevents the density to become infinite?

            • Singularities from back holes was never defined as a physical reality. They are just a concept used to show that our current laws of physics are failing, so we need other laws to describe what happen there. Actually, even Einstein proposed a solution: Einstein-Rosen bridge, aka white holes in opposition with black holes.
              This article do not explicitly name the white holes but what they seams to say is that black holes are “creating” vacuum energy. How? Maybe, one possibility is through white holes that “expels” void space.
              And this seams to make sense when we look to observable Universe at very large scale: it’s structure is similar with soap foam. A lot of “bubbles” / voids, where the matter is missing almost completely (from very small to extremely large) that have the matter concentrated on the “bubbles” surface. Is like in the center of this void exists a “wellhead of space” (white holes) and this “new” space push the matter away.

  12. I have a theory that dark energy is another universe bleeding into ours. Like air being injected into a bubble and stretching it. Black holes would be where the breaches are formed

  13. Waves, and therefore matter, compose and are composed of space-time. Blackholes suck in energy (and matter, same thing) and we thought that was it.

    I have to think on this, maybe some more coffee will help. But it sounds like the black holes are sucking the vacuum energy out of space-time, in addition to what we consider matter and energy.

    In retrospect, this does seem rather likely, as sequestering the energy released in the Big Bang Event is kind of what black holes are all about. If large black holes can indeed grow immense by consuming vacuum energy, I would be curious to know how much longer it would take them to evaporate due to Hawking radiation, or if that is even still considered possible.

    Hypothetically, we could starve a black hole by preventing matter and energy from reaching it, but we can’t prevent space-time from reaching it. And we surely can’t blockade all of the black holes in the universe, regardless.

    Inequalities in energy and space-time slow time down, subjectively (and time is nothing if not subjective, so that’s implied). Meanwhile the expansion rate of the universe is not a speed. It’s a timescale. With a reduced subjective rate of speed for everything except the expansion of the universe, this makes it appear that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

    This is unsettling as it really seems it might bring about a potential Big Rip — and much sooner than the 20 billion years some theorists are currently proposing, possibly even in just just under 2 billion years as the “fastest” rate of time (where energy and space-time briefly achieved a one-to-one relationship) relative to the cosmic expansion is already well behind us, back when the universe was around 7.8 billion years old.

    Obviously, unless you are a very slow reader, anywhere over even one billion years is enough time to finish reading your library books before you return them, but the prospect is unsettling, nonetheless.

    Slight digression regarding singularities: Because inequalities (regardless of which is relatively larger) in energy and space-time slow our rate of time down, subjectively, and their values can only be changed in proportion to each other, the singularity state is as unobtainable as the speed of light.

    • I have a theory that dark energy is another universe bleeding into ours. Like air being injected into a bubble and stretching it. Black holes would be where the breaches are formed

  16. is suggest the black are sucking up not only matter but feed on gravity itself hence lowering gravities pull on longer distance beyond gravities normal distance weakening , effectively allow the distant universe to speed away at increasing speed.

    • Lowering gravity wouldn’t cause acceleration, though, just reduced deceleration. You’d actually need some sort of anti-gravity force to cause the acceleration. But as I said, it’s not immediately obvious to me how just redistributing some of the mass of the universe into what are essentially points causes the rest of it to be repelled.

      My guess would be that it’s like the Hawking radiation, only on a gravitational level; With Hawking radiation, black holes “evaporate” by tearing apart virtual particle pairs in the vacuum, swallowing the negative mass half of the pair, promoting the positive mass half to “real” status. The black hole loses mass on account of swallowing negative mass, and the exact same amount of mass energy gets radiated away.

      If we posit some sort of background of virtual positive and negative gravitational energy, you could see the black holes swallowing the positive component, (Because it’s attractive!) and promoting the negative, repulsive component to “real” status, causing space outside the black hole to gradually become repulsive. But, just like Hawking radiation, this should be a conservative process, so why would it have an overall effect?

      Maybe something to do with the large scale structure of the universe, which appears to be organized into walls and filaments surrounding huge voids, like a foam with the stars restricted to the soapy water. Perhaps the increasing repulsive nature of the vacuum causes this structure, and the acceleration is confined to the voids? Maybe positive gravity can’t propagate through these negative gravitational energy voids?

      Way over my head here, admittedly.

  17. I can’t wait until someone creates some educational material with illustrations that explains how this works because saying “black holes cause the universe to expand at an accelerating rate because they have vacuum energy” isn’t very satisfying. Not knowing as much as physicists do about vacuum energy I was led to believe it was everywhere (not just in black holes) and if it is more concentrated in black holes and it has a repulsive effect on the universe, why does it not have that effect locally at the black hole?

    • That’s not a criticism of this blog either since it has a science journalism role whereas educational material of that nature is better tackled by YouTube content creators.

      The story is interesting though.

    • “black holes cause the universe to expand at an accelerating rate because they have vacuum energy”. No need for illustrations, I can explain that statement easily: it’s meaningless gibberish that doesn’t actually say anything. That’s because you’re absolutely right. Vacuum energy is the energy of the space-time itself. Therefore it’s everywhere and in everything contained in the universe. Which includes black holes.
      All that this new discovery did is find a correlation between the expansion of the universe and the growth of supermassive black holes. Then they’re trying to shove causation in there.

  18. Question is what will be produced when the blackhole evaporates. The theory assumes that IF a blackhole runs out of material to feed from, it becomes dormant and starts to decay in the form of evaporation, hence the main clash with quantum physics because even if an information is preserved in some form behind the event horizon, it will be lost forever in this evaporation process. Untill this scenario is solved, the problem renders everything “new” about blackholes obsolete including whether they produce dark energy or not. Lets start with solving problems we already know about to find out what blackhole actually is

    • I’m not sure that, if black hole growth is tied to the expansion of the Universe, that black holes are even capable of evaporating away, though; that goes double for the supermassive black holes, which would, under the previous theory, take much much longer to evaporate than the Stellar-mass black holes.

    • Frankly, I think conservation of information in the context of a black hole is misunderstood. What’s conserved isn’t the information itself, but rather the AMOUNT of information.

      What comes out is still random, and all details beyond mass and net charge about what went in are irreversibly lost. There’s no playback during the evaporation.

  19. It’s not entirely clear to me how this cosmological coupling is supposed to work. I joke: Actually, it’s entirely unclear.

    • I’ll wait for the pbs spacetime guy on YouTube to explain it, but I fear my brain is too smol. Like explaining writing to my dog.

      • Avinash on Youtube is a GREAT science information conveyor. Way better than the PBS spacetime guy, who always confuses me

    • This is just the macro version of the micro (quantum) concept of ‘collapse’-and-expand of Bell’s inequality. That is, the determination of an aspect of complimentary relation, such as position or velocity, necessarily corresponds with the wave-like expansion of the other conjugated attribute—it’s undeterminability, expansion of wave-like potential.
      So, in the macrocosm, the ‘uncollapsed’ (or symmetric) space/time relation of ‘vacuum’ (or potential) energy may similarly asymmetricize, or ‘collapse’, with the equivalent corresponding expansion—a system level conservation.

  20. Flat Earth, The Ether, The Contagion by Miasma, Dark Matter. All were/are accepted “scientific”, theories explaining the unknown. One thing they all have in common are the contortion of ideas to meet the observable facts.

    Discuss!

    In the case of X-rays; they did not fit into Newtonian physics so they invented Ether/Aether to “explain”, the anomaly.

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