The European University Cyprus was involved in a discovery that black holes are linked to dark energy in the universe, the University says in a press release.
Andreas Efstathiou, Astrophysicist, Rector and Director of the Aristarchus Research Centre at the European University of Cyprus, is working with the University of Hawaii and a team of 17 researchers in nine countries to develop a description of black holes that is consistent with observations over the past decade.
By searching nine billion years of existing data, the researchers discovered the first evidence of “cosmological coupling,” a newly predicted phenomenon in Einstein’s theory of gravity that is only possible when black holes are placed inside an evolving universe.
The team recently published two papers, one in The Astrophysical Journal and the other in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, that studied supermassive black holes in the hearts of ancient and dormant galaxies. The first paper found that these black holes gain mass over billions of years in a way that cannot easily be explained by standard galaxy and black hole processes, such as mergers or accretion of gas. The second paper found that the mass accretion of these black holes matches predictions for black holes that not only couple cosmologically, but also contain vacuum energy – material that results from compressing matter as much as possible without violating Einstein’s equations.
Andreas Efstathiou stated that “the question of the nature of dark energy is perhaps the most important unanswered question in modern physics. It is the majority, 70% of the energy of the universe. And now we finally have observational evidence of where it comes from, why 70%, and why it’s here now.”
Source: Cyprus News Agency