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Physicists Mourn Joe Polchinski, Developer of Deep Ideas and Paradoxes
...share of lasting developments without following trends or getting into ruts. In important recent work, Polchinski reinvigorated an old paradox about black holes. Quantum fluctuations near the horizons of black...
Physicists Find a Way to See the ‘Grin’ of Quantum Gravity
...nature of gravity and space-time must be revealed — always hide behind the horizons of black holes. “Even a few years ago it was a generic consensus that, most likely,...
To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole
...rotating black holes are stable. But their work did not cover black holes rotating above a certain threshold. Their proof also makes some assumptions about the nature of space-time. The...
How Einstein Lost His Bearings, and With Them, General Relativity
...proven especially acute for mathematicians who study the so-called black hole stability conjecture, which I wrote about in my recent article “To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole.” Depending...
Why Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Puzzle Keeps Puzzling
...that black holes are not truly black. Quantum uncertainty causes them to radiate a small amount of heat, dubbed “Hawking radiation.” They lose mass in the process and ultimately evaporate...
Black Hole Echoes Would Reveal Break With Einstein’s Theory
...center. Yet the center of a black hole is, famously, a place where we can never look. It’s protected by the black hole’s horizon — the surface surrounding the black...
Whisper From the First Stars Sets Off Loud Dark Matter Debate
...group looked at black holes as a possible explanation, since black holes are the brightest extragalactic radio sources in the sky. Yet black holes also produce other forms of radiation,...
Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity
...principle, which states that very dense strong-gravity objects such as neutron stars or black holes “fall” in the same way when placed in a gravitational field. (On Earth, the more...
What Astronomers Are Learning From Gaia’s New Milky Way Map
...massive black hole at the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Full-size galaxies almost always harbor huge central black holes, which are of mysterious provenance. Their presence in some mini...