The songs of common birds like the Northern Cardinal are mathematically identical to the signals of colliding black holes.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
No hair but plenty of feathers: are birds black holes?
arXiv · 2603.29064
The Takeaway
Researchers found that the 'chirp' of a bird's song follows the same waveform as two black holes merging in deep space. The study playfully suggests that the physics of bird vocalizations could be used to model extreme gravity and 'beyond the Standard Model' physics.
From the abstract
The imitative verb "chirp" is thought to originate from 16th-century Middle English. Meanwhile, this same word has been used to describe the gravitational waves (GWs) emitted from the merger of compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, since at least the 1990s. Motivated purely by this linguistic overlap, we study whether the chirps of birds can be modeled by compact binary waveforms. In particular, we consider a test case of the Northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), finding t