Three physicists won a $3 million Breakthrough prize for proving there is no fifth force (that we know of). And it all started with a series of table-top experiments using cheap equipment.

Eric Adelberger, Jens Gundlach and Blayne Heckel together lead the “Eöt-Wash Group,” which is devoted to precise tests of physical laws. They take their name from the early-1900s physicist Loránd Eötvös and the University of Washington, where they work. These Eöt-Wash researchers got their start in the mid-1980s, using a device known as a “torsion balance” to disprove claims of an undiscovered fifth force in physics. Since then, they’ve used more elaborate versions of the same device to test the true strength of gravity, detect the tug of dark matter in the Milky Way and search for theoretical physical effects like extra dimensions and “axion wind.”

Tracy Slatyer, known for hunting dark matter in our galaxy and discovering evidence of an ancient Milky Way explosion, has won a $100,000 prize funded by tech billionaires.

Through simulations of a dying star, a team of theoretical physics researchers have found the evolutionary origin and the maximum mass of black holes which are discovered by the detection of gravitational waves as shown in Figure 1.

The exciting detection of gravitational waves with LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory) and VIRGO (Virgo interferometric gravitational-wave antenna) have shown the presence of merging black holes in close binary systems.

A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.

The most massive black hole collision ever detected has been directly observed by the LIGO and VIRGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes scientists from The Australian National University (ANU).

The short gravitational wave signal, GW190521, captured by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories in the United States and Europe on May 21 last year, came from two highly spinning, mammoth black holes weighing in at a massive 85 times and 66 times the mass of the Sun, respectively.

But that is not the only reason this system is very special. The larger of the two black holes is considered “impossible.” Astronomers predict that stars between 65 – 130 times the mass of the Sun undergo a process called pair instability, resulting in the star being blown apart, leaving nothing behind.

When two black holes that shouldn’t exist are seen merging, physics has some explaining to do.