From Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon:
A billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the year 2015. After an immense journey, the gravitational waves from the black-hole merger pass through our solar system. On the morning of 14 September, they oh-so-slightly wiggle the arms of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington state. A pattern of light-waves shifts in a distinctive, long-sought way. A computer sounds the alarm.
Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada first heard of LIGO’s seminal detection over lunch in a bistro. It was late 2015 and still weeks to go until the results were officially released. But rumours were buzzing, and a colleague who had seen the unpublished paper spilled the beans. Afshordi, an astrophysicist who also works at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, instantly appreciated the importance of the news – both for the physics community at large, and for his own unconventional theory about the construction of the Universe.
‘I had an existential crisis at some point. I thought all the problems in cosmology had been solved,’ Afshordi recalled. ‘But then I came up with this idea that dark energy is made by black holes.’ Studies of distant stellar explosions and other lines of evidence show that our universe grows at an accelerating pace, but nobody knows the cause. Matter alone cannot have this effect, so cosmologists blame the expansion on a peculiar type of energy, called dark energy. Its origin and nature were, and are, a mystery. More.
But do we know that dark energy actually exists? Finding some would help us decide whether to cheer on or deprecate the revolution.
See also: Luke Barnes questions Steven Weinberg’s hypothesis on dark energy and galaxies
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