Prepared by: Mustafa Al-Zoubi
An international team of astronomers has created an accurate map of the expansion history of the universe over the past 12 billion years, using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Cerro Tololo Pan-American Observatory in Chile, observing a billion galaxies.
The new map will help astronomers better understand the composition of the universe, revealing the mysterious properties of dark matter and dark energy, and the comprehensive map includes the faintest and most distant galaxies.
One of the main goals of the map is to identify the nearly 40 million target galaxies to help better understand the mysterious dark energy. Mysterious dark energy is believed to be one of the great mysteries of cosmology, an unknown force that pushes things apart with a force greater than gravity and causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Dark energy makes up regarding 70% of the universe and not much is known regarding it.
Scientists from Imperial College London observed ancient and latent galaxies and found that black holes gain mass in a way consistent with them containing vacuum energy, or dark energy.
In fact, the size of the universe at different points in time is so closely proportional to the mass of supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies that the amount of dark energy in the universe can be calculated by the vacuum energy of the black hole, which means that black holes are the source of dark energy.
