Brooks Hays writes for UPI about a new study showing that supermassive black holes consume stellar debris in bursts. "What we're seeing is, this stellar material is not just continuously being fed onto the black hole, but it's interacting with itself," explains Dheeraj Pasham, a researcher at MIT's Kavli Institute and co-author of the paper.
A study by Prof. Michael McDonald details how a black hole in the Phoenix cluster is producing star-making fuel, reports Andy Rosen for The Boston Globe. “It’s an extreme system that doesn’t seem to follow all the rules that we’ve found, so it gives us a clue to what the rules are,” McDonald explains.
Postdoc Jennifer Burt speaks with Boston Globe reporter Andrew Grant about a new database of nearby stars that has been made publically available. “This could be a great way to get undergrad and high school students involved in science,” Burt explains. “We’re inspiring the next generation of scientists and that’s awesome.”
The writers and editors of Science named the successful detection of gravitational waves by researchers from MIT, Caltech and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration as their top breakthrough of 2016. Science reporter Adrian Cho writes that “physicists are eagerly anticipating what may come next, because gravitational waves promise an entirely new way to peer into the cosmos.”
In their round up of the top science stories of 2016, Science News highlighted several MIT research breakthroughs. The top story of the year was the successful detection of gravitational waves by researchers from MIT, Caltech and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Another highlight was the discovery by Prof. Susan Solomon that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is shrinking.
Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss and the LIGO team were honored as recipients of the 2016 Breakthrough Prizes during a ceremony in California, reports Lisa Krieger for Mercury News. The LIGO team was honored for their “observation of gravitational waves, a discovery which opens new horizons in astronomy and physics.”
In a series of papers, the New Horizons team, which includes MIT researchers, reveals that there may be a slushy subsurface ocean on Pluto, reports Rebecca Boyle for The Atlantic. “The research suggests that many other distant worlds in the Kuiper Belt might also hold inner oceans of water, or other liquids,” Boyle explains.
Researchers involved with the NASA New Horizons mission have uncovered evidence that an ocean of ice water lies beneath Pluto’s heart-shaped basin, reports Irene Klotz for Reuters. Prof. Richard Binzel explains that the findings show that “nature is more creative than we are able to imagine, which is why we go and explore."
Boston Globe reporter Olivia Quintana writes that the NASA New Horizons team, which includes MIT researchers, has collected data that suggests there is a slushy ocean of ice water beneath Pluto’s surface. “I think the big picture is that this is telling us that Pluto is much more complicated, much more fascinating than we ever imagined,” explains Prof. Richard Binzel.
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala speaks with Scientific American about black holes, gravitational waves, and attracting more women and minorities to STEM fields. She explains that studying the building blocks of the universe is important for understanding the “big questions: What are we made of? Where do we come from?”
Ryan Mandelbaum of Popular Science speaks with David Shoemaker, who leads MIT’s LIGO Lab and Advanced LIGO, about the second successful detection of gravitational waves. "It’s wonderful," says Shoemaker. "It’s so different from the first one ... but its importance is no less."
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz writes that scientists have been able to detect gravitational waves for the second time. “It’s a wondrous thing,” said David Shoemaker, who leads the MIT lab that helped build the detectors. “Three months apart, 1.4 billion years ago, these two events happened at two different places in the sky.”
Scientists have observed a second pair of black holes colliding using the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times. Overbye writes that LIGO provides “a way of hearing the universe instead of just looking at it.”
For the second time, scientists have detected gravitational waves produced by the collision of two black holes, reports Irene Klotz for Reuters. “We are starting to get a glimpse of the kind of new astrophysical information that can only come from gravitational-wave detectors,” says David Shoemaker, who leads Advanced LIGO.
In an article for New Scientist, Lisa Grossman writes that for the second time the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected gravitational waves. “This gives us confidence,” says MIT research scientist Salvatore Vitale. “It was not just a lucky accident. Seeing a second one tells us clearly that there is a population of black holes there.”