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Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record – and the closest one to Earth found to date.

Researchers have dubbed it “The Unicorn,” in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the constellation Monoceros – “The Unicorn.” The findings were published on April 21, 2021, in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“When we looked at the data, this black hole – the Unicorn – just popped out,” said lead author Tharindu Jayasinghe, a doctoral student in astronomy at The Ohio State University and an Ohio State presidential fellow.

The highlight of the new chart is a wake of stars, stirred up by a small galaxy set to collide with the Milky Way. The map could also offer a new test of dark matter theories.

Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record—and the closest one to Earth found to date.

Researchers have dubbed it ‘The Unicorn,’ in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the constellation Monoceros—’The Unicorn.’ The findings are publishing today, April 21, in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“When we looked at the data, this black hole—the Unicorn—just popped out,” said lead author Tharindu Jayasinghe, a doctoral student in astronomy at The Ohio State University and an Ohio State presidential fellow.

A hunt for hypothetical axions streaming from Betelgeuse turns up empty but helps physicists set constraints on their properties.

Qubits offer a fast, highly reliable way to solve one of the great mysteries in physics. Some kind of invisible material is out there affecting the motions of stars and galaxies, but thus far, no one has been able to directly detect the substance—called dark matter—itself. But some are hoping that.

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87 is coming into sharper and sharper focus.

Four of the newfound quadruply imaged quasars are shown here: From top left and moving clockwise, the objects are: GraL J1537-3010 or “Wolf’s Paw;” GraL J0659+1629 or “Gemini’s Crossbow;” GraL J1651-0417 or “Dragon’s Kite;” GraL J2038-4008 or “Microscope Lens.” The fuzzy dot in the middle of the images is the lensing galaxy, the gravity of which is splitting the light from the quasar behind it in such a way to produce four quasar images. By modeling these systems and monitoring how the different images vary in brightness over time, astronomers can determine the expansion rate of the universe and help solve cosmological problems. Credit: The GraL Collaboration.

With the help of machine-learning techniques, a team of astronomers has discovered a dozen quasars that have been warped by a naturally occurring cosmic “lens” and split into four similar images. Quasars are extremely luminous cores of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes.

Over the past four decades, astronomers had found about 50 of these “quadruply imaged quasars,” or quads for short, which occur when the gravity of a massive galaxy that happens to sit in front of a quasar splits its single image into four. The latest study, which spanned only a year and a half, increases the number of known quads by about 25 percent and demonstrates the power of machine learning to assist astronomers in their search for these cosmic oddities.

Ultralight bosons are hypothetical particles whose mass is predicted to be less than a billionth the mass of an electron. They interact relatively little with their surroundings and have thus far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they exist, ultralight bosons such as axions would likely be a form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe.

Now, physicists at MIT’s LIGO Laboratory have searched for ultralight bosons using black holes—objects that are mind-bending orders of magnitude more massive than the particles themselves. According to the predictions of quantum theory, a black hole of a certain mass should pull in clouds of ultralight bosons, which in turn should collectively slow down a black hole’s spin. If the particles exist, then all black holes of a particular mass should have relatively low spins.

But the physicists have found that two previously detected black holes are spinning too fast to have been affected by any ultralight bosons. Because of their large spins, the black holes’ existence rules out the existence of ultralight bosons with masses between 1.3×10^-13 electronvolts and 2.7×10^-13 electronvolts—around a quintillionth the mass of an electron.

Black holes seemed to come only in sizes small and XXL. A new search strategy has uncovered a black hole of “intermediate” mass, raising hopes of more to come.