Tuesday, August 11, 2026

What If There's a Star Inside a Black Hole?

The shadow of the supermassive black hole at the centre of M87, the first ever directly imaged. We can photograph the boundary. What lies inside it remains a matter for the mathematics (Credit : Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across, its interior perfectly well behaved and apparently defying the laws of physics.



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