Tanmay Kumar Poddar

A neutron star the size of a city spins thirty times per second. Its magnetic field is trillions of times stronger than Earth's. Such conditions could spawn a cloud of axions around the star — light particles that no detector has caught yet, but which neatly explain the hidden mass of the Universe.

A tiny ring of superconductor, cooled to near absolute zero, could feel the touch of a particle billions of times lighter than an electron. We're talking about the axion — a hypothetical particle that might make up the dark matter filling the universe.

A tiny black hole the size of an atomic nucleus floats in the hot soup of the early universe. Normally, such a little one should quickly evaporate, releasing energy like a drop of water on a hot skillet. But if space is more complex than it seems and contains hidden dimensions, everything changes.