European University Cyprus involved in study of black holes

The European University Cyprus on Thursday said it was part of a study proposing that black holes are linked to dark energy in the universe.

Astrophysicist Andreas Efstathiou, rector and director of the Aristarchus Research Centre at the European University, is part of an international team of researchers at the University of Hawaii, working 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 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.

“We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy,” Duncan Farrah, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and the architect of the study told the Guardian.

“This dark energy is produced when normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars.”

The researchers say their studies provide a framework for theoretical physicists and astronomers to test further — and for the current generation of dark energy experiments such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the Dark Energy Survey. – to shed light on the idea.

“The question of the nature of dark energy is perhaps the most important unanswered question in modern physics,” Efstathiou said in a press release. “It is the majority, 70 per cent of the energy of the universe.

“And now we finally have observational evidence of where it comes from, why 70 per cent, and why it’s here now.”