Astronomy and astrophysics

With increasing data quality (shown progressively, left to right, in images from 2012, 2015, and 2019) Assistant Professor Michael McDonald and colleagues can conclusively show that the black hole in the Phoenix galaxy cluster is not preventing star formation.

Phoenix cluster is cooling faster than expected

With increasingly advanced data, Michael McDonald and colleagues study a galaxy cluster bursting with new stars.

November 20, 2019

Putting the “bang” in the Big Bang

Physicists simulate critical “reheating” period that kickstarted the Big Bang in the universe’s first fractions of a second.

October 24, 2019

Researchers have for the first time used a massive cluster of galaxies as a huge magnifying lens to detect a small, star-forming dwarf galaxy.

Astronomers use giant galaxy cluster as X-ray magnifying lens

New lens technique spots tiny dwarf galaxy in the first, super-energetic stages of star formation.

October 14, 2019

A simulation of early galaxy formation under three dark matter scenarios. In a universe filled with cold dark matter, early galaxies would first form in bright halos (far left). If dark matter is instead warm, galaxies would form first in long, tail-like filaments (center). Fuzzy dark matter would produce similar filaments, though striated (far right), like the strings of a harp.

This is how a “fuzzy” universe may have looked

Scientists simulate early galaxy formation in a universe of dark matter that is ultralight, or “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm.

October 3, 2019

Worlds orbiting stars other than our sun are “exoplanets,” and they come in many sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets. This illustration of a "super-Earth" represents the type of planet that the TESS mission aims to find outside our solar system.

Computing and the search for new planets

MIT planetary scientists partner with computer scientists to find exoplanets.

September 23, 2019

KATRIN’s spectrometer, shown here, precisely measures the energy of electrons emitted in the decay of tritium, which has helped scientists come closer to pinning down the mass of the ghost-like neutrino.

3Q: Scientists shave estimate of neutrino’s mass in half

Joseph Formaggio explains the discovery that the ghostly particle must be no more than 1 electronvolt, half as massive as previously thought.

September 16, 2019

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is inspected before its launch in April 2018. Approximately 250 MIT scientists and engineers are included as recipients of the NASA Silver Achievement Medal for their role in the TESS mission.

TESS team is awarded NASA's Silver Achievement Medal

The honor recognizes the "stellar achievement" of the people behind the exoplanet-seeking satellite.

September 12, 2019

MIT scientists have captured the “ringing” of a newly-formed black hole, in the form of gravitational waves, depicted in this artist’s illustration.

Scientists detect tones in the ringing of a newborn black hole for the first time

Results support Einstein’s theory and the idea that black holes have no “hair.”

September 12, 2019

The MIT Haystack Observatory houses a specialized supercomputer called a correlator, which crunched data generated by the EHT project.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded to Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration for black hole observation

Nearly 30 MIT-affiliated researchers will share in the prize, while David Jay Julius ’77 wins Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences; assistant professor of physics Max Metlitski shares New Horizons prize with Xie Chen PhD ’12 and Michael Levin PhD ’06.

September 6, 2019