Black holes may be the source of mysterious dark energy

When astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, they theorized that some force must be pushing things farther apart and overcoming gravity, which should be slowing things down. That force was suggested to be dark energy, but no one has ever figured out from where it comes.

But a team of 17 international researchers led by the University of Hawaii has discovered the first evidence for the origin point of dark energy: Black holes.

Black holes acquire mass in two ways: accretion of gas and mergers with other black holes.

But in studying nine billion years of black hole evolution in dormant giant elliptical galaxies, the researchers discovered that the older black holes are much larger than they should be based on those two methods of growth.

That means there must be another way these black holes are acquiring mass. Researchers suggest the answer is dark energy in the form of vacuum energy, “a kind of energy included in spacetime itself … [that] pushes the universe further apart, accelerating the expansion,” according to a statement