Occam's Razor yet again ...

 

An artist's concept of a supermassive black hole, complete with a fiery accretion disk.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Black holes, the possible connect of quantum mechanics and relativity, might also be the dark energy engines causing the universe to expand ever faster, has been a mystery frustrating researchers to no end until now.

Supermassive black holes could be the engines driving the expansion of the universe, according to research that proposes a solution to "one of the biggest problems in cosmology." 

By comparing supermassive black holes across nine billion years of cosmic history, astronomers have discovered a clue that the ravenous behemoths lurking at the hearts of most large galaxies may be the source of dark energy — the mysterious force that makes up 68% of the known universe(opens in new tab) and causes its accelerating expansion. The researchers published their findings Feb 2. and Feb 15. in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionise 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," co-author Chris Pearson(opens in new tab), an astrophysicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the U.K. said in a statement.

Solving the mystery at last?

Over the last century, astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding at an ever faster pace. This was surprising given that, acting on its own, gravity should be expected to slowly crumple the cosmos together in an event known as the Big Crunch. To explain the discrepancy, scientists proposed that something powerful enough to counteract gravity must exist, and was pushing everything in the universe further apart. They named that something dark energy.

But for dark energy to reverse a cosmic collapse, it would have to be present in such enormous quantities that it makes up the vast majority of the universe. Yet, until now, it has been nowhere to be seen.

Now, the new studies have seemingly found a clue as to how the hidden phenomenon works. Both teams compared the masses of black holes at the centers of two sets of galaxies. One group was young and remote, with light that arrived to us from nine billion years in the past, while a nearer and older group sits only some millions of light-years away. The astronomers found that throughout the universe giant black holes had ballooned to be seven to 20 times larger than they once were — a monstrous growth that couldn't be explained simply by black holes devouring stars or colliding and combining with each other.

Instead, the researchers propose that black holes are growing in lockstep with the universe — overcoming the star-crushing, light-capturing forces at their cores with a hypothetical type of dark energy called vacuum energy that makes them expand ever outwards. And, somehow, they drag the entire fabric of the cosmos out with them.

Occam's Razor applies yet again ... AKA  the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony/Less is more - Dizzy Gillispie

Part of a page from John Duns Scotus's book Commentaria oxoniensia ad IV libros magistri Sententiarus, showing the words: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate", i.e., "Plurality is not to be posited without necessity"