Everywhere you go in the Universe, gravity exists.
It’s inextricably woven into its fabric, forming stars and planets, and choreographing the dance of galaxies.
It’s what keeps our world together and us upon it – yet even after more than a century of studying gravity by way of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, scientists are still discovering surprising new ways it can behave.
But a new discovery by physicists Luca Comisso of Columbia University and Felipe A. Asenjo of Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile may take the relativity biscuit.
Their new calculations suggest that gravitational fields may be able to break and reconnect in new configurations – just like magnetic fields do on the Sun.
“We are not modifying general relativity or introducing new physics beyond it. Rather, we are identifying physical principles that have remained unrecognized for more than a century,” Comisso told ScienceAlert.
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Our everyday experience of gravity is of a force that keeps us more or less on the ground. But there’s more to it than just attraction. According to relativity, gravity is described by a field – the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, which influences how matter and light move through the Universe.
The equations describing this curvature are a masterpiece of physics, allowing physicists to predict everything from the bending of starlight to the gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes – and they’ve survived test after test in the classical Universe.
But the Universe has other kinds of fields, too.
We only have to look to the Sun to find some – vast magnetic fields threading through the charged solar plasma, whose tangled strands can break and reconnect in a process called magnetic reconnection, unleashing the energy that powers solar flares.
And, as Comisso and Asenjo have now demonstrated mathematically, gravity may have a similar trick in its repertoire.
“We had suspected that gravity might share some properties with magnetic fields, since it has long been known that Einstein’s equations can be rewritten in forms that resemble the equations of electromagnetism,” Comisso explained.
“However, we did not know how far this analogy would extend. It was only after working through the analytical calculations, step by step at the blackboard, that we realized just how closely gravitational fields could follow the same principles that govern magnetic fields in plasmas.”
The revelation began with an earlier paper the pair published alongside a third co-author, physicist Maricarmen A. Winkler of Adolfo Ibáñez University.
Their calculations showed that, under certain conditions, gravitational fields can behave as though their connections are frozen in place, preserving the links between different regions even as spacetime evolves.
They realized that this behavior has a striking analog in the magnetic fields of electrically charged plasma, where field lines can remain connected even as the plasma flows and changes shape.
But, as we have already established, magnetic fields don’t always behave this way. When the conditions that keep their field lines connected break down, those connections can rearrange themselves through magnetic reconnection, changing which regions are linked by the magnetic field.
So, it seemed natural to wonder if the same could be true of gravity, too.
To find out, Comisso and Asenjo returned to Einstein’s equations, using a mathematical formulation that reveals similarities between gravity and electromagnetism.
They investigated what happens when the conditions that preserve gravitational field connections break down, and found that, under certain circumstances, the fields can reconnect in new configurations – a process they call gravitational reconnection.
“Instead of lines extending through three-dimensional space, the gravitational field forms sheets extending through four-dimensional spacetime (three dimensions of space and one of time),” Comisso explained.
“Like magnetic field lines, these sheets are not physical objects, but mathematical structures that help us visualize the gravitational field. As spacetime evolves, these sheets can stretch, bend, and, under certain conditions, break and reconnect in a new arrangement.”
“This does not mean that spacetime itself tears apart, but rather that the gravitational field changes how different regions of spacetime are connected.”
A schematic illustration of gravitational field sheets, mathematical structures whose connections can change through gravitational reconnection. (Comisso and Asenjo/APS 2026)
If this process occurs in the Universe, its effects wouldn’t necessarily be something we could see or even feel. Even the gravitational ripples from colliding black holes – arguably the most hefty events the Universe can pull off – change the length of LIGO’s 4-kilometer arms by less than the width of a proton.
But the physics implications, now – there, we’re talking.
Physicists can currently use supercomputers to simulate the dramatic changes in spacetime that accompany massive events like black hole collisions or core-collapse supernovae.
But being able to calculate how spacetime evolves doesn’t necessarily reveal the underlying physical mechanisms responsible for energy transfer.
This is where gravitational reconnection could be useful, and magnetic reconnection on the Sun gives a real-world example. Physicists can simulate the behavior of solar plasma, but identifying magnetic reconnection as a mechanism responsible for releasing its energy gives them a deeper understanding of what is happening and why.
“What I find particularly remarkable is that these principles give us a new way to understand the complex dynamics of spacetime in relatively simple physical terms,” Comisso said.
“Just as magnetic reconnection has transformed our understanding of how magnetic energy is released in plasmas, gravitational reconnection could provide a similarly powerful framework for understanding how gravitational fields evolve and exchange energy and momentum with matter.”
There’s still a great deal to learn, however. For now, gravitational reconnection is a theoretical possibility, not a phenomenon that scientists have observed in nature.
An artist’s impression of two black holes spiraling toward one another, emitting gravitational waves. Such mergers are among the environments where gravitational reconnection might occur. (LIGO/T. Pyle)
The researchers believe gravitational reconnection could occur in a variety of astrophysical settings, such as merging black holes or collapsing stars.
Numerical simulations, Comisso said, could help identify the conditions under which it happens and characterize how the process unfolds.
One particularly tantalizing possibility is that gravitational reconnection might leave a distinctive signature in the gravitational waves emitted by colliding black holes. If it does, those simulations might reveal what to look for in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA data.
“Our work provides the theoretical foundations for gravitational reconnection, but we still need to determine the precise conditions under which it occurs in nature and understand its role in astrophysical phenomena,” Comisso said.
“For us, this is one of the most exciting questions that our research has opened up, and one we are eager to investigate further.”
The research has been published in Physical Review D.
This article was fact-checked by Fiona MacDonald and edited by Fiona MacDonald. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.