Rong-Gen Cai

Scientists have described a new type of invisible star that behaves like a breathing lens. Such a star is made of ultralight boson particles (not yet discovered). Its gravity causes spacetime curvature — this is the lens, which rhythmically expands and contracts, as if breathing.

If a black hole spins quickly, it can hold a cloud of ultralight particles around it, so light that their mass almost vanishes. They arrange themselves in layers, like electrons in an atom, only here gravity does the job instead of electric forces. This structure stores energy, like a coiled spring.

In the search for the nature of dark matter, one of the most intriguing hypotheses traces back to the first moments after the Big Bang. Back then, quantum fluctuations of the inflation field gave rise to clumps of matter that could collapse into primordial black holes.