Ivan Alvarez-Rios

In the quantum world, dark matter particles can merge into a single superfluid droplet — a state where matter flows without friction, like an ideal fluid. When near a black hole, this droplet doesn’t just disappear into it but twists into stable vortices, like water swirling around a rock in a stream.

Inside a supercomputer, fifteen stable wave clumps — solitons — collide to form a halo of dark matter. These waves obey an equation that Erwin Schrödinger derived for electrons at the beginning of the 20th century, but now they paint a portrait of a giant galactic cocoon.

A swarm of tiny invisible particles, like a cloud of pollen, drifts through space. A black hole sits in its path. Some particles fall in and vanish forever; others swing around the trap and fly away. The physicists built a map showing exactly how much matter gets swallowed and how much survives.