Gravitational Atoms: When Boson Stars Break the Laws of Energy
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.
Reverse Tides: The Remarkable Deformation of Boson Stars
The ocean bulges toward the Moon in a tidal hump. But some objects do the opposite — instead of stretching matter, the tide presses a dent into it. These are boson stars: invisible clumps of boson particles that can all collapse into a single quantum state. Normal matter is propped up by heat; boson stars are held together by quantum pressure.
A Pearl in a Dark Matter Shell
A neutron star is the ultra-dense remnant of a supernova: the mass of the Sun packed into a sphere the size of a city. For billions of years, it travels through space, gathering around itself invisible matter, dark matter, which emits no light but pulls with gravity.