A pathbreaking new study has suggested that black holes, one of the mysterious entities in space, could be the driving force behind the expansion of the universe.
Physicists who were involved in the study noted that black holes might be containing a strange form of energy which is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
It was in the late 1920s that astronomers initially found that the universe is expanding. For decades, space experts believed that this expansion will slow over time.
However, in the 1990s, scientists found that the exact opposite was happening in the universe.
Scientists found that the farther an object was from our vantage point, the faster it seemed to be moving away from us, which clearly indicates that the expansion of the universe was accelerating over time.
Scientists soon proposed the idea of dark energy, and suggested that this energy could be the cause behind the expansion of the universe.
And now, new research suggested that dark energy may be most probably concentrated on black holes. The research team also proposed an idea that black holes may be in fact the source of dark energy.
"We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy," said Duncan Farrah, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, the Guardian reported.
The researcher added: "This dark energy is produced when the normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars."
According to researchers who took part in the study, black holes have cores of dark energy and it is created and stored inside the black holes.
"The importance of this work is that it's taken the theories about black holes with dark energy cores and linked them for the first time to tangible observations of the universe," said Chris Pearson, a co-author of the study.
