Blog post: swansont: Hey Photon, That Black Hole Makes You Look Rather Svelte

“Ultralight photons with nonzero mass would produce a ‘black hole bomb’: a strong instability that would extract energy from the black hole very quickly,†said Pani, the paper’s lead author. “The very existence of such particles is constrained by the observation of spinning black holes. With this technique, we have succeeded in constraining the mass of the photon to unprecedented levels: the mass must be one hundred billion of billions times smaller than the present constraint on the neutrino mass, which is about two electron-volts.â€