microscopic black hole

It's like a sprint record: to break it, you need a perfect run-up. But for sub-millisecond pulsars, the run-up is too short. The fastest known pulsar, PSR J1748-2446ad, spins 716 times per second — faster than a kitchen blender. If it were the size of Earth, a point on its equator would move at about 0.24 times the speed of light. But why doesn't any pulsar spin even faster?

On the surface of the Moon and asteroids, you can find pits smaller than a pinhead but with shiny, melted rims. Such marks are left by tiny meteorites, but the exact impact speed at which melting occurs remained unclear.

At the centers of many galaxies, not only supermassive black holes lurk, but also vast clouds of invisible matter. If this matter consists of ultralight particles, it can gather into dense clumps — a kind of 'star' made of dark matter.

In the late 1990s, the night sky delivered a surprise: Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess found that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Ever since, the greatest riddle has been dark energy — a substance making up nearly 70% of the cosmos, yet evading laboratory study.

When a massive star dies, its core collapses, and a supernova explosion occurs. The cataclysm births streams of particles — like ripples from a thrown stone. The first to arrive are swift neutrinos, which pierce the Earth, hardly interacting. Then, hours later, ghost particles with a tiny charge appear.

A black hole is like a pot that slowly boils away. Its surface emits particles, a process known as Hawking radiation. The hotter the pot, the faster it empties. But what if the pot is not ordinary, but has a double bottom — capable of turning into a passage to another place?

A spotlight shines through a dark hall. Between the lamp and the wall, an invisible lens drifts by, and the spot of light briefly brightens and shifts. That is exactly what the DECam telescope, aimed at the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, was watching for five consecutive nights.

A research probe is planned for the nearest black hole — a region of spacetime whose gravity traps even light. After a hundred years of flight, the spacecraft will enter orbit around the mysterious object to answer a key question: are we looking at a black hole or a neutron star — the ultra-dense remnant of a massive star, compressed to nuclear…

If you shrank an ordinary black hole to the size of a grain of sand, it would shine like a tiny star and quickly vanish in a flash. That's Stephen Hawking's prediction: the event horizon acts like a hot surface emitting particles.

From 2016 to 2018, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, protons collided at energies of 13 teraelectronvolts, as if two peas were accelerated to speeds where their impact spawns a whole swarm of new particles.

A star made of dark matter is an invisible ocean of ultra-light particles, whose existence was first suspected by Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930s. Into this ocean plunges a neutron star — a tiny, yet unimaginably dense sphere.

In the dense, star-forming gas cloud W44, the ALMA telescope has spotted eight tiny clumps racing at enormous speeds. In position–velocity maps, each one looks like the letter V, just like the previously discovered 'Bullet'. This resemblance hints at a common origin.

In 2017, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational detectors caught ripples in spacetime from the merger of two black holes 540 megaparsecs away. The event was named GW170814. But what remained after this cosmic collision? Besides distorted space, tiny black holes, or 'crumbs', might have been born.