A mysterious ring of light is thought to surround every black hole, and Alex Lupsasca wants to glimpse one for the first time. The tendril-thin halo, called a photon ring, has the power to reveal secrets from the black hole’s edge.
Black holes are regions of the universe where spacetime is warped so dramatically that nothing can escape. Physicists predict that particles of light, or photons, can graze the edge of the black hole without falling in. These photons orbit the black hole one or more times before breaking away. This light makes up the photon ring.
Spotting the photon ring could help test physicists’ theories about these mysterious objects, and whether any alternative explanations could account for them. “Seeing this photon ring and confirming that it’s really produced by orbiting photons would be ironclad, definitive proof that the object that we’re looking at really is a black hole,” Lupsasca says.
Lupsasca, a theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, is the project scientist for the Black Hole Explorer. His work has illuminated the potential properties of the photon ring the researchers aim to detect. The project’s goal is to put a space-based radio telescope in Earth orbit in 2031. By joining forces with other radio telescopes on the ground, it would effectively create a telescope three times the size of Earth. That would allow scientists to take the sharpest images in the history of astronomy, Lupsasca says, and hopefully reveal the photon ring.
This summer, the capabilities of AI startled Lupsasca. When he prodded the large language model GPT-5 Pro, it reproduced the conclusion of one of his papers, deducing in minutes what he’d spent weeks pondering. In October, he also joined OpenAI for Science, where he’ll continue researching black holes.
For Lupsasca, the search for the photon ring is paramount. “What higher calling could you find than to try to understand the mysteries of the universe?”
Credit to : Science News
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