Evidence for a new type of subatomic particle could be lurking within the gravitational waves produced by some merging black holes, according to calculations by physicists in the US and the Netherlands. John Stout at Harvard University and colleagues have studied a process whereby a cloud of hypothetical ultralight bosons could form around a black hole, creating a “gravitational atom”. They reckon that if such a black hole were in a merging binary pair, the presence of the ultralight bosons would be revealed by “kinks” frequencies of the emitted gravitational waves.
To read more, click here.