A spinning black hole acts like a giant funnel, but instead of just sucking in everything around it, it twists space itself, like a swift river current. New calculations show that in this maelstrom, stable vortices can be born from ultralight particles — likely building blocks of dark matter. Unlike ordinary objects, these whirlpools don’t immediately plummet into the abyss but circle around for a long time, their motion betraying just how much the black hole warps spacetime around it — an effect predicted by Einstein’s theory.
Thus, we gain a new tool to study black holes and dark matter. The most surprising aspect is the scale: a whirlpool can exceed the size of the Solar System while remaining invisible, because its particles are lighter than a feather. These giant ghostly structures live for millions of years and may already appear to us as brief flares near black holes.
These whirlpools are billions of times finer than an atom, yet span millions of kilometers, dwarfing the black hole itself.