Topic
Black holes are regions of spacetime with gravity so strong nothing escapes; astronomers study their growth, spin, and radiation to probe extreme physics.
Southampton's Black Hole Hunters project wants volunteers to vet AI-screened telescope data for black holes beyond the roughly 70 whose locations are known. A volunteer's flag picks a target for telescope follow-up, and the team counts a discovery only once it detects gravitational self-lensing.
Reality
Quanta's physics writer calls holography the most profound idea in theoretical physics in 30 years, built on three papers cited tens of thousands of times. The citations measure how many theorists took it up, and whether holography describes our own universe is the open question the essay sets out to answer.
Reality
A signal LIGO Hanford and Virgo recorded in October 2024 was loud and lopsided enough to pin down how spin deforms its 19.6-solar-mass object. Rotating boson stars with quartic self-interactions cannot fit it.
Reality
A calculation of the race between accretion and Hawking radiation puts the smallest black hole that can grow inside a Galactic bulge white dwarf at about 40 metric tons, roughly 250,000 times below the no-feeding threshold.
Reality
An MIT-led team reports in Nature that the object radiates 100 billion times more than any star can, and argues the early universe's "little red dots" are their own class of object.
Reality