When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Credit: Robert Lea (Created with Canva)Scientists have strengthened the potential connection between dark energy and black holes. New research suggests that as more black holes were born in “little Big Bang reverse replays” in the 14.6 billion-year-old cosmos, the strength of dark energy grew to dominance and continues to change to this day.Dark energy is the placeholder name given to the mysterious force driving the acceleration of the universe’s expansion in its current epoch. It is troubling because scientists have no idea what dark energy is, yet it dominates our universe, accounting for around 70% of the cosmic matter/energy budget. This wasn’t always the case, however. Prior to the dark energy-dominated epoch, matter and gravity had ruled the universe and had succeeded in slowing its initial Big Bang-driven expansion to a near stop. Dark energy then staged its cosmic coup around 5 billion years ago, “hitting the gas” on the expansion of the universe again. The problem is that no one knows where it came from or how that switch from matter to dark energy happened.To address this mystery, a team of scientists has been asking themselves where in the modern-day universe is gravity as strong as it was at the beginning of the universe? The answer is only at the heart of black holes. Thus, the team determined that black holes could be “cosmically coupled” to dark energy.Yellow, orange and green orbs appear against a black background”According to the cosmological coupling hypothesis, black holes are coupled to the expanding universe and are filled with dark energy that grows as the universe expands,” team member Gregory Tarlé, professor of physics at the University of Michigan, told Space.com. “This new development provides confirming evidence that cosmologically coupled black holes may very well be the dark energy of the universe.”Tarlé says that this could be because when a black hole forms during the death and gravitational collapse of another black hole, it is akin to the Big Bang running in reverse. During this process, the matter of the massive star that births a black hole would become dark energy during its complete gravitational collapse.If black holes contain dark energy, the team theorizes that they can couple with the fabric of the universe and drive its accelerating expansion. They don’t yet have the details of how this is happening, but they have evi …
