MIT Professor Emeritus George Whipple Clark PhD ’52, an astrophysicist who was highly influential in X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy, died on April 6 in Boston. He was 94. Clark employed buckets, balloons, rockets, and satellites in his nearly lifelong pursuit to understand the nature and origins of cosmic rays, gamma rays, and X-rays. Clark discovered […]
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As a star runs out of fuel, it will billow out to a million times its original size, engulfing any matter — and planets — in its wake. Scientists have observed hints of stars just before, and shortly after, the act of consuming entire planets, but they have never caught one in the act until […]
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WASHINGTON — On an Air National Guard base in Cape Cod, Mass., more than 1,200 military service members and civilians maintain one of the largest support systems for Pentagon drone missions around the world. One of the workers was Airman First Class Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old accused of posting top-secret military reports online. Why such […]
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Once every 10,000 years or so, the center of a galaxy lights up as its supermassive black hole rips apart a passing star. This “tidal disruption event” happens in a literal flash, as the central black hole pulls in stellar material and blasts out huge amounts of radiation in the process. Astronomers know of around […]
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Each night, the stars of the sky compete with thousands of satellites. The number of intruders is only growing as constellations of satellites proliferate, with companies planning to launch orbiters by the tens of thousands to transmit internet and other communications signals back to Earth. Among them are SpaceX, which has already launched thousands of […]
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An accretion disk is a colossal whirlpool of gas and dust that gathers around a black hole or a neutron star like cotton candy as it pulls in material from a nearby star. As the disk spins, it whips up powerful winds that push and pull on the sprawling, rotating plasma. These massive outflows can […]
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Virgin Orbit, a satellite launch company whose fortunes have sunk since one of its rockets failed to reach orbit in January, filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States on Tuesday. The company, founded by Richard Branson, had an unusual way of getting satellites into space: A converted Boeing 747 aircraft would carry aloft a […]
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No power, no lights, no water, no heat. In Ukraine over the past year, waves of Russian missiles have assailed the nation’s infrastructure, leading to daily struggles for civilians and to months of frantic repairs to keep the electricity flowing. An American satellite has revealed this darkening of the entire nation, creating a vivid companion […]
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At age 9, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro SM ’20, PhD ’22 was preoccupied with down-to-earth problems, such as devising an alternative to her father’s messy, paper Filofax organizer, and fixing the unreliable electric service plaguing her home of Owerri, Nigeria. Could she have imagined a path-breaking, 17-year career at NASA, followed by a position as the nation’s […]
Read More At age 9, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro SM ’20, PhD ’22 was preoccupied with down-to-earth problems, such as devising an alternative to her father’s messy, paper Filofax organizer, and fixing the unreliable electric service plaguing her home of Owerri, Nigeria. Could she have imagined a path-breaking, 17-year career at NASA, followed by a position as the nation’s […]
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“MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in […]
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A mesmerizing display of lights streaking in the night sky over Northern California on Friday was caused by the re-entry of flaming space debris into Earth’s atmosphere, experts said. Specifically, flaming chunks of communications equipment, which were jettisoned from the International Space Station in February 2020, streaked across the sky at 17,000 miles per hour, […]
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Tornadoes, one might think, should be easy to spot. They reach down like gnarled fingers in the heat of storms, ripping trees from the ground and blowing cars off the road, picking up Kansas farmhouses and transporting them to the land of Oz. But things are not so simple in Canada, or in any region […]
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Some of the clearest satellite imagery in weeks of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut shows widespread damage to apartment buildings, bridges and industrial plants after weeks of heavy bombardments and street-by-street combat. One image, taken on Monday by Maxar Technologies, shows bridges across the Bakhmutovka River have been destroyed. The river divides the city and […]
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A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which appears today in Nature, […]
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The Hubble Space Telescope, known for recording awe-inspiring images of the cosmos while advancing the field of astronomy, is under threat. Private companies are launching thousands of satellites that are photobombing the telescope — producing long bright streaks and curves of light that can be impossible to remove. And the problem is only getting worse. […]
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On Sept. 26, 2022, at precisely 6:14 p.m. ET, a box-shaped spacecraft no bigger than a loveseat smashed directly into an asteroid wider than a football field. The planned impact knocked the space rock off its orbit, showing for the first time that an asteroid can potentially be deflected away from Earth. The spacecraft […]
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On Feb. 7, Iran unveiled a new underground Air Force base called “Eagle 44” in a slick propaganda video. On the wall was a clue hiding in plain sight: a poster with silhouettes of fighter jets. One in particular stands out. It’s situated front and center, and is in the shape of a state-of-the-art military […]
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“The Chinese military has written about a range of potential applications for balloons and drones in near space,” he added. “You can intercept communications that you can’t capture from space. You can loiter for longer periods of time over targets, study or interfere with an adversary’s radar, target enemy satellites and help guide strategic weapons.” […]
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WASHINGTON — Navy divers were working to locate portions of the debris from the Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down six miles off the coast of South Carolina, defense officials said on Sunday. The recovery effort, which is expected to take days, began not long after debris from the balloon hit […]
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