Researchers suggest that they have found evidence that the expanding universe is also making black holes grow bigger. The findings of the team were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters last week, claiming that the universe expansion might be causing celestial objects like supermassive black holes to expand as well.
“We have proposed that the mass of any black hole is proportional to the size of the universe,” Kevin Croker, co-author of the paper, told Gizmodo.
Why don’t Earth and Sun expand?
This raises up the question of why objects like our planet or the Sun don’t expand as well. The explanation is that these objects aren’t old enough; however, if they are swallowed by a black hole, they could be a part of the phenomenon.
“In any expanding universe, all black hole masses will grow this way,” Croker told Gizmodo. “If the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the black hole masses will grow faster and faster. So it’s not the acceleration of the expansion that causes the growth, just the expansion itself.”
To reach the conclusion, the researchers modeled the size of two actual colliding black holes in relation to the expanding universe. They found out that as the objects got closer to one another, they appeared to grow in proportion to the universe’s expansion.
More advanced instruments can confirm findings
The team also discovered that this growth could also occur in black holes that weren’t colliding, like the ones that are located at the centers of galaxies. It’s just all hypotheses for now, and the team hopes that more advanced instruments in the future will enable them to confirm their findings.
Previously, a team of astronomers detected a series of bright flares of X-ray light coming from behind a supermassive black hole. They were able to make the discovery due to an unusual characteristic of black holes. “The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself,” Dan Wilkins, lead author of the study said. This phenomenon was already predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
