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21 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 9, 2026.
A reformulation of Einstein's equations that resembles plasma physics hints at a 'gravitational reconnection' that could release energy in black hole mergers, though it remains theory.
A Berlin mathematician adds a gravitational-wave term to lunar tidal models and lists the errors that must be controlled before any leftover signal could count as real.
Columbia and Chilean researchers rewrote Einstein's equations in plasma-style variables and found gravitational field 'sheets' that can reconnect.
An analysis of about 100,000 quasars shows faster-moving black holes are redder and dustier, as general relativity's recoil prediction implies; the authors say it could mean about half the sample recently merged.
Columbia and Chilean researchers rewrote Einstein's equations to look like plasma physics and found a process that moves energy from gravitational fields into matter.
A theoretical study finds a narrow loophole in the laws of thermodynamics that might let a rapidly rotating black hole divide into two smaller ones, leaving a possible gamma-ray signature.
A Berkeley, Vienna and Caltech team says a chilled loop of helium-4 could rival space-based measurements of frame-dragging, on the ground.
A Physical Review Letters paper shows that a measure of how distinguishable quantum states are, evaluated at a horizon, yields the semiclassical Einstein equations.
A new calculation says that once a black hole's horizon is temporarily distorted in one direction, its radiation cannot return to its original behavior with zero trace.
PSR J1856-0039 weighs about 2.49 suns combined and orbits in 2.36 hours. When its stars collide, the remnant is likely to be a neutron star rather than a black hole.
In Physics of the Dark Universe, Shin'ichi Nojiri and Sergei Odintsov find that objects with negative mass can arise consistently in a universe filled with negative-pressure fluid or extra scalar fields, and could bend light the wrong way.
Nine years after proposing the test, a Birmingham–Perimeter team measured how rotation squashed the heavier object in GW241011. Rotating boson stars with quartic self-interactions cannot explain it.
Nagoya University physicists found that hidden matter around a black hole shifts the frequency and the decay rate of its gravitational-wave ringdown by different amounts — a mismatch detectors could look for.
A team aboard the China Space Station ran the first atom-interferometry test of Einstein's weak equivalence principle in permanent free fall, and matched the two isotopes' accelerations to five parts in 100 million.
Penn researchers used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to watch galaxy clusters pull on each other at the largest scale ever measured — and squeezed the room left for modified-gravity alternatives to dark matter.
A rising, bird-like pattern in an exploding star's light gave away the birth of one of the universe's most magnetic objects — and forced Einstein's relativity into the story of a supernova for the first time.
Watching a distant supernova flicker four times in a quickening rhythm, astronomers caught the moment an ultra-magnetic neutron star switched on — and saw Einstein's relativity at work in an exploding star.
Theoretical study suggests massive stellar collapse might trigger birth of tiny cosmos driven by dark energy, forming exotic objects called gravastars.
University of Tennessee physicists detected Earth's gravitational pull on particles of light in a benchtop interferometer, probing the elusive seam between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Revolutionary gravastar theory suggests massive stellar collapse triggers miniature universe creation, challenging conventional black hole formation.
The clearest black hole merger ever recorded — with a signal-to-noise ratio nearly three times higher than LIGO's first detection — verified multiple tones predicted by Einstein's general relativity.