Bhaskar Dutta

At the very heart of the Milky Way, something is glowing, but not with starlight; with gamma rays invisible to the eye.

A swarm of tiny ice balls is scattered across a warm room. Some melt faster, others slower, but when only wet spots remain, they all vanish in the same way: the last drop evaporates according to the same law. This is roughly how primordial black holes behave — hypothetical objects born in the first moments after the big bang.

A billiard ball clicks against another in complete darkness. The sound of the impact and the clatter of balls dropping into pockets: that's all you hear. This is roughly how physicists study the interactions of elementary particles at energies that no terrestrial accelerator can reproduce.