Does Dark Energy Come From Black Holes?
No, it does not, and it’s depressing to see more junk science cluttering up the public imagination
Earlier this month two nominally reputable journals published a couple of papers which together claim that the source of dark energy could be black holes. Not surprisingly, science journalists ran sensationalist headlines and people began jumping up and down in an excited sort of way, rather like Tigger channeling Winnie-the-Pooh’s joy at being offered “a little something” of both honey and bread. But just like Tigger and Pooh, the two papers were more fiction than fact and it’s astonishing that they passed even the most cursory editorial review.
The two papers in question were published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Dr Dave Clements of Imperial College London and Dr Chris Pearson of STFC RAL Space claim that their study “could revolutionize the whole of cosmology.” So let’s see what they are saying they have found, because that’s a pretty sizeable sort of claim for anyone to make.
By looking at the sizes of black holes residing in galaxies of various distances from our own, they found that black holes seem to grow somewhat faster than current models would predict. Instead of assuming that this discrepancy is almost certainly…
