“Dark Energy Originates from a Vast Sea of Objects Spread Throughout Cosmic

Scientists suggest that a counter-intuitive, hypothetical species of black holes may negate the standard model of cosmology,where dark energy is an inherent and constant property of spacetime that will result in an eventual cold death of the universe. “It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London about dark energy, the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. “It’s very frustrating.”

Generic Objects of Dark Energy

Astronomers have known for two decades that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but the physics of this expansion remains a mystery. 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 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. Research fellow Kevin Croker, and mathematician Joel Weiner at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 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.

“The Elephant in the Cosmos” –New Theory Says ‘No Need’ for Dark Energy

Fast forward to today, a team of researchers at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa led by Croker have made a novel prediction—the dark energy responsible for this accelerating growth comes from a vast sea of compact objects spread throughout the voids between galaxies. This conclusion is part of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In 2019, Kroker proposed that objects like Powehi, the recently imaged supermassive compact object at the center of galaxy M87, might actually be GEODEs. The Powehi GEODE, shown to scale, below would be approximately 2/3 the radius of the dark region imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. This is nearly the same size expected for a black hole. The region containing Dark Energy (green) is slightly larger than a black hole of the same mass. The properties of any crust (purple), if present, depend on the particular GEODE model. (Photo: EHT collaboration; NASA/CXC/Villanova University)

Mimic Black Holes

In the mid-1960s, physicists first suggested that stellar collapse should not form true black holes, but should instead form Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). Unlike black holes, GEODEs do not ‘break’ Einstein’s equations with singularities. Instead, a spinning layer surrounds a core of dark energy. Viewed from the outside, GEODEs and black holes appear mostly the same, even when the “sounds” of their collisions are measured by gravitational wave observatories.

Because GEODEs mimic black holes, it was assumed they moved through space the same way as black holes. “This becomes a problem if you want to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe,” said Croker, lead author of the study. “Even though we proved last year that GEODEs, in principle, could provide the necessary dark energy, you need lots of old and massive GEODEs. If they moved like black holes, staying close to visible matter, galaxies like our own Milky Way would have been disrupted.”

Croker collaborated with UH Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy graduate student Jack Runburg, and Duncan Farrah, a faculty member at the UH Institute for Astronomy and the Physics and Astronomy department, to investigate how GEODEs move through space.

“Entirely New Class of Phenomenon”

The researchers found that the spinning layer around each GEODE determines how they move relative to each other. If their outer layers spin slowly, GEODEs clump more rapidly than black holes. This is because GEODEs gain mass from the growth of the universe itself. For GEODEs with layers that spin near the speed of light, however, the gain in mass becomes dominated by a different effect and the GEODEs begin to repel each other.

“The dependence on spin was really quite unexpected,” said Duncan Farrah. “If confirmed by observation, it would be an entirely new class of phenomenon.”

The team solved Einstein’s equations under the assumption that many of the oldest stars, which were born when the universe was less than 2 percent of its current age, formed GEODEs when they died. As these ancient GEODEs fed on other stars and abundant interstellar gas, they began to spin very rapidly. Once spinning quickly enough, the GEODEs’ mutual repulsion caused most of them to ‘socially distance’ into regions that would eventually become the empty voids between…