I'm surely missing something in the paper, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the fact that black holes gain mass in a way that is seemingly coupled with the rate of expansion of the universe mean that it's driving the expansion - couldn't the universe just be expanding, giving the black holes the energy they would need to get this large?
Unfortunately the article seems to gloss over that point with just one sentence:
The conclusion is profound: Croker and Weiner had already shown that if k is 3, then all black holes in the universe collectively contribute a nearly constant dark energy density, just like measurements of dark energy suggest.
That sentence contains a link to a paper[1] that's highly technical and beyond my understanding of physics, but concludes:
A population of such stellar-collapse remnants can shift in energy $\propto a^3$ while diluting in number density $\propto 1/{a}^{3}$. The population-averaged energy density is then effectively constant and readily produces the observed ${{\rm{\Omega }}}_{{\rm{\Lambda }}}$.
which matches the claim in the article.
But to understand why, I guess we'd have to learn general relativity to understand the math in that paper.
Comments
I'm surely missing something in the paper, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the fact that black holes gain mass in a way that is seemingly coupled with the rate of expansion of the universe mean that it's driving the expansion - couldn't the universe just be expanding, giving the black holes the energy they would need to get this large?
Super interesting papers!
Unfortunately the article seems to gloss over that point with just one sentence:
That sentence contains a link to a paper[1] that's highly technical and beyond my understanding of physics, but concludes:
which matches the claim in the article.
But to understand why, I guess we'd have to learn general relativity to understand the math in that paper.
1: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab32da#...