A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of energy. […]
Read More
For many graduate students, waking up at noon after a 4 a.m. bedtime is a sign of a night well spent. For a group of MIT students, it was simply the start of their workday — timed not to the sun, but to the aurora. Their goal was simple: to study plasma phenomena using the […]
Read More
Across the Milky Way galaxy, a planetary odd couple is circling a star some 190 light years from Earth. A normally “lonely” hot Jupiter is sharing space with a mini-Neptune, in a rare and unlikely pairing that’s had astronomers puzzled since the system’s discovery in 2020. Now MIT scientists have caught a glimpse into the […]
Read More
A new immersive sound installation at Oulu Cathedral, Finland, brings the research of MIT astrophysicist and associate professor of physics Kiyoshi Masui into a striking sensory form, transforming more than 4,000 cosmic signals into spatial audio. With its grand opening on April 4, “The Logos” project invites visitors to experience deep-space phenomena not as distant […]
Read More
Three MIT rising seniors have been selected to receive a 2026 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, including Deeksha Kumaresh in the School of Engineering and Anna Liu and Charlotte Myersin the School of Science. An estimated 5,000 college sophomores and juniors from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, of whom only 454 were selected. The Goldwater […]
Read More
When the densest objects in the universe collide and merge, the violence sets off ripples, in the form of gravitational waves, that reverberate across space and time, over hundreds of millions and even billions of years. By the time they pass through Earth, such cosmic ripples are barely discernible. And yet, scientists are able to […]
Read More