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Gaming has reached nearly unprecedented levels of hype in 2026, which is mostly due to the biggest launch the industry has seen in years, Grand Theft Auto 6 . After several delays, Rockstar has finally confirmed that GTA 6 will launch on November 19, and pre-orders for the game are officially live as of a few weeks ago, confirming that it will now launch on schedule. The next big gaming launch of the year before GTA 6 comes when Insomniac Games releases its next big Marvel project, Wolverine , starring Liam McIntyre as the new Logan. This will be Insomniac’s first game since Spider-Man 2 in 2023. The biggest release of 2026 so far came not long ago with the premiere of 007 First Light , the Patrick Gibson -starring James Bond game developed by IO Interactive , the same studio behind the Hitman games.

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China’s mysterious next-generation combat aircraft have dominated headlines since a pair of sixth-generation designs broke cover in late 2024 . But while those aircraft understandably command attention, the single most important fighter in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is arguably the Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon. Not only does the J-20 offer a level of capability previously missing from the PLAAF, but it is being introduced in remarkably large numbers. This underscores China’s ability to mass produce even the most advanced weapons in its arsenal. The quantities of J-20s that are now rolling off the production line also highlight the pace of the PLAAF’s transformation and raise the question of exactly how many Mighty Dragons have already been fielded.

The appearance of new Chinese combat aircraft designs, including the J-35 medium-weight stealth fighter in both naval and land-based versions, means that the J-20 is no longer under such a high level of public scrutiny. This contrasts with the situation back in 2021, when TWZ provided a review of the program on what was then the 10th anniversary of its first flight.

A J-20 fighter performs during the Changchun Air Show on September 23, 2025 in Changchun, Jilin province of China. Photo by Zhou Guoqiang/VCG via Getty Images

At that time, we stated that the J-20 was, “without doubt, the main focus of global attention when it comes to China’s military aircraft developments. Within the People’s Republic of China, too, the jet known as the Mighty Dragon has become a totem for the country’s fast-emerging high-technology defense sector and its associated aviation industries .”

It is worth recalling that when the J-20 first appeared on the runway at Chengdu’s sprawling manufacturing plant in late 2010, the black-painted aircraft was deemed by some Western observers to be a technology demonstrator at best, not something that would end up being the country’s first stealth fighter built at scale. It is one thing to fly an impressive, hand-built experimental aircraft. It’s very much another to produce an advanced fighter reliably en large quantities, especially one that incorporates stealth technologies that are notoriously challenging to manufacture. However, after some design tweaks, the J-20’s service entry followed in late 2016, and the jet became only the third true stealthy fighter to become operational anywhere in the world.

Picture of an early J-20 prototype.

Since then, the J-20 has continued to be improved , and new variants have emerged. Perhaps the most significant development concerning the jet has been the introduction of a domestically produced powerplant to the series-built aircraft, superseding the use of previous Russian-supplied engines. A two-seat version of the aircraft has also appeared, representing a notable novelty for a fifth-generation fighter. More advanced weapons — and more of them — and enhanced avionics have also been steadily introduced.

Most important, however, has been the increased production rate of the Chengdu jet, leading to its proliferation across the units of the PLAAF.

A still from an official PLA video showing a J-20 with its novel side weapons bays open, showing two short-range PL-10 air-to-air missiles. via Chinese internet

At the end of 2019, nearly a decade after the J-20 first appeared, Western sources estimated the number of J-20s built to be around 50 , a figure that likely also included pre-production machines. At the same time, unconfirmed Chinese reports suggested a production capacity of 48 aircraft annually, but there was no publicly available evidence that that figure had been attained.

By late 2022, Western defense outlets were reporting that the PLAAF had received at least 200 J-20s, a figure based primarily on a study of construction numbers seen on the jets and equating to four production batches. At the same time, more than 240 examples of the J-16 multirole fighter aircraft, a Chinese development of the two-seat Flanker family, were said to be in service, equivalent to 11 batches. Also in production, the number of J-10C s in service was somewhat lower, but the fleet was also bolstered by older J-10A/B versions.

A YY-20 aerial tanker simultaneously refuels J-16 and J-20 fighters. via Chinese internet

In its assessment of the PLAAF modernization drive, in early 2023, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a British think tank, was somewhat more circumspect, counting a frontline fleet of at least 150 J-20s. However, the IISS noted, the fleet was projected to outnumber the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptors by the end of the same year, aided by an annual production rate that “had likely doubled” within the previous three years.

Three U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors assigned to the 90th Fighter Squadron, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. U.S. Air Force U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Kevin Long

As for the F-22, the U.S. Air Force currently has 185 , but only 143 of the jets are combat-coded, with the rest being assigned to training and test and evaluation activities. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the overall fleet is typically down for maintenance at any given time.

A detailed analysis of the operationalized nature of the J-20 program was provided by Janes in mid-2024. This concluded that, in a period of over 11 months from July 2023, the PLAAF had inducted more than 70 J-20s, for a total of approximately 195 of the aircraft. Using satellite imagery, it was determined that, as of May 2024, the PLAAF operated 12 air brigades with J-20s, of which three brigades were fully equipped with the type. Significantly, it also confirmed that all five of the Theater Commands — joint military commands organized on a geographical basis — had inducted the J-20.

A two-seat J-20S (top), a J-20A (bottom left), and a J-20 (bottom right). via Chinese internet

Moving forward to 2025, it appeared that the J-20 production total had rapidly reached the 300 mark.

In the fall of that year, Andreas Rupprecht, a longtime Chinese military observer and contributor to this website, identified a J-20 with a serial number that indicated it was the 300th airframe, from the 10th production batch.

Another two images pic.twitter.com/TSrs5iYxmy

— @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) September 12, 2025

Meanwhile, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a U.K.-based think tank, assessed that, by late 2025, production rates for the J-20 had likely reached around 120 aircraft per year, and that around 300 of the aircraft were in service across at least 13 PLAAF regiments. “The total produced is likely to be higher,” RUSI explained in a report on the subject, “since a significant number of newly produced fighters will still be awaiting delivery to units.”

Based on the trend, RUSI suggested in its report earlier this year that, by 2030, around 1,000 J-20s of all versions (plus around 900 J-16s) will be in service with the PLAAF. “There is also a noticeable trend towards heavy fighters in general, with J-16s and J-20s being used to re-equip units that previously were operating not only J-11 and Su-27/30 Flanker heavy fighters, but also some J-7 light and J-8 medium fighters,” the report added.

Rupprecht told TWZ that he is confident that, as of mid-2026, around 500 J-20s had likely been delivered. This theory is reinforced by the presence of the jets with 14 frontline PLAAF units, and with another three Flight Test and Training Bases (FTTB), which operate mixed fleets. Of the 14 frontline units, four appear to have introduced the enhanced J-20A version, replacing the initial-production J-20s

I took the liberty of adding a few comments to your table!

Thanks to @Hurin92 https://t.co/7ypDLm35wQ pic.twitter.com/8ZoAECPUvX

— @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) July 3, 2026

Interestingly, among American officials, there has been some downplaying of the J-20’s capabilities vis-à-vis the U.S. military.

“It’s not anything to lose a lot of sleep over,” Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) head Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach said in 2022. “Certainly, we’re watching them closely and seeing how they field and how they operate them.” Wilsbach qualified his comments by saying that the U.S. Air Force has “had a limited opportunity to assess it [the J-20], but it seems okay.”

On the other hand, other U.S. Air Force leaders have highlighted concern over the rapidly growing PLAAF, an expansion in which the J-20 is playing a major role.

“We are the smallest and oldest that we have ever been,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Doug Wickert, head of the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, said of his service during a briefing early last year. “The PLA is the largest and most modern that it has even [sic; ever] been. That is risk. That is uncertainty.”

Brig. Gen. Doug Wickert, 412th Test Wing commander, points to an image of the B-21 Raider. U.S. Air Force

Wickert added that he predicted that, by 2027, China would have numerical superiority of approximately 12 to one in modern fighter aircraft (including five to three in fifth-generation aircraft) in relation to U.S. assets stationed west of the international dateline.

At the same time, we don’t know how many J-20s Beijing intends to buy. As well as its continued development, much will depend on plans for the land-based J-35, which could potentially offer a cheaper alternative for some mission sets. Beyond that, there are at least two sixth-generation crewed combat aircraft designs and various collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs) and uncrewed combat air vehicles (UCAVs) that will need to be factored into the future force structure.

Undoubtedly, the J-20 has faced challenges, too, but it has matured from a prototype that some were quick to dismiss into the backbone of China’s premier air arm. Its continued evolution in terms of engines, avionics, weapons, and variants is important, but the most important development may simply be the rate at which China is able to build it.

In the same way that technologies and tactics developed alongside the J-20 will find their way into China’s next generation of combat aircraft, these will also be able to leverage the advances in production output. China has proven to be remarkably capable of punching out large numbers of advanced fighters, so these new aircraft could hit flightlines in greater quantities faster than some may expect, once they are developmentally mature enough to enter production. Moreover, Chengdu’s serial-manufacturing abilities underscore the wider degree to which China can churn out its most advanced weapons, of all kinds , which is historically a hugely challenging endeavor.

A head-on view of the new-generation Chinese combat aircraft known as the J-36. via Chinese internet Chinese internet via X

In military terms, quantity has a quality all its own, and if current production estimates are even broadly accurate, the J-20 program has entered a phase where manufacturing capacity is just as strategically significant as the fighter’s stealth and performance.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post How Many J-20 Mighty Dragon Fighters Does China Actually Have? appeared first on TWZ .

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Physicists have coaxed a black hole's most famous glow out of a strand of optical fiber and, for the first time, watched that light react back on the simulated black hole that produced it.

The result gives researchers a rare, hands-on look at Hawking radiation ‪—‬ the faint thermal emission that Stephen Hawking predicted should leak out of black holes ‪—‬ and offers a first clue about the tiny push that could, in principle, make a real black hole slowly evaporate, the research team said in a new study.

Working with a tabletop experiment in optical fibers, the international team detected both the radiation and its long-sought "back reaction" — the way the radiation feeds energy back and reshapes the object that created it.

According to the new study, published July 1 in the journal Nature , the light behaved exactly as Hawking predicted it should: like the glow of a warm object, with a definite temperature and a spectrum that fades away steadily toward higher frequencies. It did so even in a regime where the usual textbook description of a black hole should break down.

An infographic explaining how Hawking radiation works, contrary to the predictions of general relativity. (Image credit: ALAIN BOMMENEL,VALENTINA BRESCHI,WILLIAM ICKES via Getty Images) Where three great theories collide

Hawking radiation is famous because it sits at the crossroads of physics ' biggest ideas.

"Jacob Bekenstein predicted that black holes have an entropy and a temperature, and Hawking calculated the thermal radiation of the black hole," study co-author Ulf Leonhardt , a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told Live Science via email. "In Hawking-Bekenstein radiation, quantum physics, general relativity and thermodynamics come together — subjects that are normally in conflict with each other."

The conflict runs deep: General relativity pictures space and time as smooth and continuous, while quantum mechanics describes a world of discrete, unpredictable jumps ‪—‬ and no one has managed to fully reconcile the two.

That combination is exactly what makes Hawking radiation so hard to study. Astronomers have never seen Hawking radiation from a real black hole and probably never will; the glow is far too faint to pick out across the cosmos. So physicists have turned to laboratory stand-ins that obey the same equations, building black hole analogues out of flowing water, ultracold atoms and, as in this study, light.

Physicist Stephen Hawking that black holes should be able to lose information through an elusive type of radiation. New research zooms in on the mechanism that makes it possible. (Image credit: Bryan Bedder / Stringer via Getty Images) Building a black hole from light

The trick behind every black hole analogue is a moving medium. "Imagine a swimmer in the sea with a current faster than he can swim," Leonhardt explained. "He is swept away. This is what happens beyond the [event] horizon , and this is why normally nothing can escape the black hole."

A black hole's event horizon is the boundary where that current — space itself, in real life — starts moving faster than anything can travel. To recreate it, the team needed a material that appears to rush along at the speed of light. Their solution was elegant: use light to make the "material."

"In optics we need a material that appears to move at the speed of light," Leonhardt said. "For this we use light itself — in nonlinear optics, light acts like a material."

In practice, the researchers fired an intense, ultrashort "pump" pulse into a thin photonic-crystal fiber — a strand of glass threaded with a pattern of tiny air channels running along its length, which lets researchers fine-tune how light moves through it. As it traveled, the pulse slightly changed how the glass bent light, creating a moving speed bump that raced along with it. A second, much weaker "probe" pulse then ran into this moving front. Where the probe could no longer keep up, an artificial horizon formed — and the black hole analogue was born.

Catching the glow and its pushback

The payoff came in the ultraviolet. According to theory, Hawking radiation is created in pairs: One partner escapes, while the other, carrying "negative" energy, is the mirror image that would fall into a real black hole. In the fiber, that partner showed up as ultraviolet light.

"We counted photons in the ultraviolet that correspond to the Hawking partners beyond the horizon," Leonhardt explained. "They have a wavelength around 233 nanometers. This was our signal."

Just as important as seeing the glow was understanding how it was made. For years, researchers assumed the fiber built up its Hawking radiation through a cascade — a chain of separate steps in which the light is converted first into one intermediate form, and then another, each feeding the next before the radiation finally emerges. The team found that, instead, a single, direct interaction does the job, with the pump and probe light producing the Hawking pair in one clean step. It is a much simpler picture that the researchers said may carry over to other analogues and perhaps even to real black holes.

Because energy has to come from somewhere, making Hawking radiation should nudge the source that created it. For a real black hole, that nudge is how it loses mass and, over unimaginable timescales, evaporates entirely — the process Hawking described in his landmark 1974 paper. No experiment had ever captured that recoil.

Here, the team saw it. Producing the radiation shifted a small fraction of the pump pulse's own light to a slightly different color, leaving a telltale lopsided pattern in the spectrum. That asymmetry, absent in earlier experiments, is the fingerprint of the back reaction, or recoil — the black hole analogue quietly paying the energetic price for its own glow.

The road to a quantum experiment

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The result also speaks to one of the thorniest puzzles in black hole physics: the trans-Planckian problem. Trace Hawking's radiation back to where it was born and the calculation runs into territory no physicist can vouch for — the Planck scale, the vanishingly small size at which space and time are thought to lose their familiar meaning and all known physics gives out. Hawking's prediction, in other words, appears to rest on a foundation that may not exist.

"Any light getting away from the horizon is stretched out enormously," Leonhardt said. "So it must come from waves smaller than the tiniest scale in nature, where the physics is unknown. Would that still give Hawking radiation? That was the question, and we have answered it in our experiment." Remarkably, the glow stayed perfectly thermal even in this extreme regime.

The team's next step is concrete. So far, they have used ordinary laser light, which reproduces the spectrum of Hawking radiation but not its deepest quantum weirdness. Next, the team plans to "go quantum," Leonhardt said. "We will explore how to get into the quantum regime and observe quantum features such as entanglement " — the ghostly link that should tie each escaping Hawking particle to its lost partner.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

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Obesity reflects prices, advertising and access, not simply weak willpower. Ministers must now act

Britain has spent the last three decades asking individuals to make healthier choices inside a market that makes those choices more expensive and less visible. It is no surprise then that the proportion of adults in England living with obesity nearly doubled in that time, to 30%. MPs on the health select committee have decided enough is enough. Preventing obesity in future generations, they say , must take precedence over the interests of the food and drink industry.

In a report to parliament, the cross-party committee argues that preventing obesity demands radical action to regulate food markets. To those who say “just wait for cheap Ozempic”, MPs offer a clear answer: off-patent GLP-1 drugs may transform treatment, but treatment is what becomes necessary when prevention has failed.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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Of all the big TV shows to be released in the last 10 years, perhaps none have had the same cultural impact as Stranger Things . The young stars of Stranger Things have blossomed into massive Hollywood figures, headlining other movies and TV shows, scoring millions of views each year. Creators Ross and Matt Duffer continue to work with Netflix on new projects like The Boroughs , and producer/director Shawn Levy is even directing the next Star Wars movie coming out in 2027. As hard as it is to believe, Stranger Things has officially been around for 10 full years , and to celebrate the important anniversary, Netflix is giving its flagship sci-fi property some new releases for fans to be excited about.