Ke Yang

Radio pulsar J1574+4703 behaves like a finicky lighthouse. Instead of shining steadily, it turns its radio beam on in short flashes and then falls silent for long stretches. Objects like this are called 'rotating radio transients', or RRATs for short.

The universe, according to the Standard Model, seems to be a three-dimensional canvas upon which familiar physics unfolds. Yet deep down, beyond the threshold of the everyday, there may be curled-up, invisible dimensions — six or seven tightly wound loops, as predicted by string theory.

Boson stars are gravitational atoms. Only instead of electric charge, gravity itself serves as the nucleus, holding a cloud of scalar field in quantized clumps.