Scientists may have finally figured out what Dark Energy is and how it’s powering the expansion of the Universe!
New Atlas explains:
“We’ve known for the better part of a century that the universe isn’t static – it’s expanding…
The driving force behind this acceleration has been given the descriptor ‘dark energy,’ and it’s been calculated that this stuff makes up around 68 percent of everything in the universe. But we still don’t really know what it actually is.
One fringe hypothesis suggests that this unknown form of energy could be lurking inside an exotic class of objects referred to as Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These objects would look very much like black holes to outside observers, but they would be made up of a core of dark energy, surrounded by a spinning layer.
And now, a new study has suggested an explanation for how these GEODEs might be accelerating the expansion of the universe – and where we might find them.
Researchers from the University of Hawaii calculated that the speed at which the outer layers spin changes how they move relative to each other. If they spin slowly, the GEODEs would clump together very quickly – more quickly than black holes do, in fact. That’s because of the mind-bending detail that GEODEs would gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself.
But if the outer layers are spinning much faster, near the speed of light, then the GEODEs begin to repel each other. And this repelling effect, the team says, could be what largely drives the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
‘The dependence on spin was really quite unexpected,’ says Duncan Farrah, co-author of the study. ‘If confirmed by observation, it would be an entirely new class of phenomenon.’
The researchers say that the new study supports the idea that, if they exist, GEODEs could rather neatly solve the dark energy problem.”
And here I thought geodes were just cool rocks!
But in all seriousness, how exactly could they do that?
Sci Tech Daily further clarifies exactly what’s going on here:
“Astronomers typically assume that large stars form black holes when they die, but this is not the only possible outcome. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could now be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain Dark Energy instead of a singularity.
In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, consistent with the presence of a uniform contribution of Dark Energy. It was not recognized, however, that GEODEs could contribute in this way. With the corrected formalism, Croker and Weiner showed that if a fraction of the oldest stars collapsed into GEODEs, instead of black holes, their averaged contribution today would naturally produce the required uniform Dark Energy.”
All in all, it’s a neat theory. One that is easy to imagine being true, even if it is going to be hard to prove experimentally. After all, why would there be some unexplained phenomenon behind the expansion of the Universe? Most likely there was a logical explanation. One that is tied to the root mechanics of how physics works. Even if we hadn’t yet discovered what that was. But perhaps these GEODEs can help us paint a clearer picture. Help us to figure out once and for all what’s really going on out there. In the vastness of the Universe.
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