Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that researchers determined how fast a supermassive black hole spins by measuring a star being swallowed by the black hole. Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham explains that, “this measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant.”
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.”