Starship Asterisk*

The smearing of starlight near the Milky Way’s central black hole could provide a new window into extra dimensions.

Black holes have been praised as potential extradimensional peepholes before. Gravity is surprisingly weak at macroscopic scales, especially compared to the other fundamental forces, and some physicists think gravity could be leaking from the three-dimensional world humans inhabit into extra, unobserved dimensions. Observations of black holes could help (SN: 9/26/09, p. 22): Shrinking black holes could be evaporating into other dimensions, and any tiny black holes that might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider would be the result of extra-strong gravity at micrometer length scales, meaning gravity’s relative weakness can be blamed on extra dimensions.