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Observational Evidence for Cosmological Coupling of Black Holes and its Implications for an Astrophysical Source of Dark Energy

  • Authors: Duncan Farrah, Kevin S. Croker, Michael Zevin, Gregory Tarlé, Valerio Faraoni, Sara Petty, Jose Afonso, Nicolas Fernandez, Kurtis A. Nishimura, Chris Pearson, Lingyu Wang, David L Clements, Andreas Efstathiou, Evanthia Hatziminaoglou, Mark Lacy, Conor McPartland, Lura K Pitchford, Nobuyuki Sakai, Joel Weiner

Duncan Farrah et al 2023 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 944 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 1.

(Top) Posterior distributions of cosmological coupling strength k, inferred by comparing supermassive black holes (BHs) in local elliptical galaxies to those in five samples of elliptical galaxies at z > 0.7. (Bottom) Combining these posterior samples with equal weighting gives a distribution with ﹩k={3.11}_{-1.33}^{+1.19}﹩ at 90% confidence. If fit to a Gaussian, the fit has a mean of k = 3.09 with a standard deviation of 0.76 (shading). Vertical lines indicate: k = 0 coupling, as expected for traditional BHs like Kerr and the decoupled solution by Nolan (1993); and k = 3 coupling, as predicted for vacuum energy interior BHs. The measurement disfavors zero coupling at 99.98% confidence and is consistent with BHs possessing vacuum energy interiors, as first suggested by Gliner (1966).

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