Astronomers from MIT have detected echoes in X-ray flares emitted by a black hole consuming stellar material, writes Charles Q. Choi for Space.com. The findings “might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes,” writes Choi, “but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that a team of researchers, including MIT scientists, have detected fast radio bursts (FRB) coming from a distant galaxy. Coldewey explains that the researchers used the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment radio telescope, which “points at the whole sky and chooses where to ‘look’ using software,” to identify 13 new FRBs.
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey highlights how MIT researchers have found that tiny satellites, called CubeSats, equipped with lasers could help keep telescopes on track while they are gathering information in space. The light emitted from the lasers could allow satellites “to calculate their position and the minute changes to their imaging apparatus caused by heat and radiation.”
NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space, reports CBS News. "Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we're seeing is new," says John Richardson, principal investigator for the plasma science experiment onboard the spacecraft.
Researchers from the LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations have detected four new black hole collisions, including the largest black hole merger detected, reports Ryan Mandelbaum for Gizmodo. Researchers have begun cataloguing “black hole collisions to tell the broader story about how often these massive crashes occur and what causes them.”
BBC News reporter Jonathan Amos writes that LIGO (operated by MIT and Caltech) and Virgo researchers have detected gravitational waves emanating from the largest black hole merger ever detected. Amos notes the discovery was announced by the collaboration as part of an “expanded catalogue” of detections that “tells us something about the probable future successes of the laser laboratories.”
Prof. Marcia Bartusiak speaks with Radio Boston’s Evan Horowitz about her book, “Dispatches from Planet 3.” Bartusiak explains that she was inspired to “take a new exciting finding and provide the backstory. All of these essays are taking something new - a new idea, a new discovery - and showing that it had an origin or a seed in the past.”
Two months after its launch, the TESS satellite has already identified two new exoplanet candidates, reports Mary Beth Griggs for Popular Science. “The team is excited about what TESS might discover next,” explains Prof. Sara Seager, who is serving as the deputy science director for the mission.
New Scientist reporter Will Gater writes that the TESS satellite has found its first two exoplanets. “This is one of the first objects we looked at,” says MIT postdoctoral fellow Chelsea Huang of the discovery of an exoplanet about 60 light years away. “We were immediately saying ‘hey this is too good to be true!’”
New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye writes about how the TESS satellite has already identified at least 73 stars that might have exoplanets. “TESS is doing great,” says George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT who is leading the TESS mission. Ricker adds that the satellite is, “all that we could have wished for!”
The first image captured during the initial orbit of the MIT-developed TESS satellite shows thousands of stars in the Southern Sky, reports Brooks Hays for UPI. “Galaxies, globular clusters and thousands of stars can be found within the portrait of the Southern Sky. Hidden in the image are exoplanets,” writes Hays.
The MIT-developed TESS satellite has sent back its first batch of images of the southern sky from its quest to identify nearby exoplanets, reports writes Chris Ciacci for Fox News. Ciacci notes that the resulting images are “nothing short of incredible.”
Axios reporter Andrew Freeman writes that the TESS satellite has captured its first images of the southern sky. “This swath of the sky’s southern hemisphere includes more than a dozen stars we know have transiting planets based on previous studies from ground observatories,” explains MIT’s George Ricker, TESS’ principal investigator.
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that by studying ancient quasars, MIT scientists have uncovered evidence supporting quantum entanglement, the concept that two particles can become linked despite their distance in space and time. “We’ve outsourced randomness to the furthest quarters of the universe, tens of billions of light years away,” says Prof. David Kaiser.
Space.com reporter Chelsea Gohd writes that MIT researchers have used the light emitted by two ancient quasars to provide evidence of quantum entanglement, the theory that two particles can become linked across space and time. The researchers used ancient quasars to see if, “the correlation between particles can be explained by classical mechanics stemming from earlier than 600 years ago.”