Gregory Tarlé

Almost 14 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the Big Bang, a mysterious energy drove an exponential expansion of the infant universe and produced all known matter, according to the prevailing inflationary universe theory.

That ancient energy shared key features of the current universe’s dark energy, which is the largest mystery of our time by at least one objective standard: It makes up the majority—roughly 70%—of the universe, but scientists don’t know exactly what it is.

“If you ask yourself the question, ‘Where in the later universe do we see gravity as strong as it was at the beginning of the universe?’ the answer is at the center of black holes,” said Gregory Tarlé, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study. “It’s possible that what happened during inflation runs in reverse; the matter of a massive star becomes dark energy again during gravitational collapse—like a little Big Bang played in reverse.”

In a new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Tarlé and colleagues from five institutions are strengthening the case for this scenario with recent data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. DESI is made up of 5,000 robotic eyes mounted on the Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory on the land of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

“If black holes contain dark energy, they can couple to and grow with the expanding universe, causing its growth to accelerate,” said Kevin Croker, lead author of the team’s new study and an assistant research scientist at Arizona State University. “We can’t get the details of how this is happening, but we can see evidence that it is happening.”

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