Mathematicians just proved that a cloud of gas can literally be crushed by its own weight into a single point that takes up zero space.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.14871
The Takeaway
While we know gravity pulls matter together, it was previously unclear if the internal 'bounciness' of gas particles would always prevent a total collapse. This study proves that if the initial gravity is strong enough, the gas will literally vanish into a zero-sized singularity in a finite amount of time, providing a mathematical roadmap for how black holes might form from diffuse clouds.
From the abstract
The isotropic Landau (Coulomb) operator was introduced in kinetic theory by Krieger and Strain (Comm. Partial Differential Equations, 2012). In this work, we study the spatially inhomogeneous Vlasov--Poisson--isotropic Landau system. We first establish a local--in--time existence theory for the Cauchy problem: for initial data satisfying a suitable smallness condition in an appropriate norm, there exists a non--negative solution on a time interval $[0,T]$, where the lifespan $T$ depends on the s