Ayush Bidlan

Black holes are famous for their dark silhouette against a bright glow. It's not actually a shadow, but severely bent light curving around the object. Yet the cosmos also hosts impostors — ultra-dense bodies without an event horizon that warp light in their own distinct way. These distortions can reveal the ruse.

Einstein’s cosmological constant — a blunder or a boomerang insight? The universe’s acceleration caught physicists off guard: ΛCDM works, but why is the vacuum energy so absurdly tiny? Imagine an ocean heaving with quantum fluctuations, yet on the surface only a microscopic ripple.