MIT astronomers have observed the elusive starlight surrounding some of the earliest quasars in the universe. The distant signals, which trace back more than 13 billion years to the universe’s infancy, are revealing clues to how the very first black holes and galaxies evolved. Quasars are the blazing centers of active galaxies, which host an insatiable supermassive black hole at their core. Most galaxies host a central black hole that may occasionally feast on gas and stellar debris, generating a brief burst of light in the form of a glowing ring as material swirls in toward the black hole. Qu ..read more

New research from the group of MIT Professor Brett McGuire has revealed the presence of a previously unknown molecule in space. The team's open-access paper, “Rotational Spectrum and First Interstellar Detection of 2-Methoxyethanol Using ALMA Observations of NGC 6334I,” appears in April 12 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Zachary T.P. Fried, a graduate student in the McGuire group and the lead author of the publication, worked to assemble a puzzle comprised of pieces collected from across the globe, extending beyond MIT to France, Florida, Virginia, and Copenhagen, to achieve this e ..read more

At the heart of a far-off galaxy, a supermassive black hole appears to have had a case of the hiccups. Astronomers from MIT, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have found that a previously quiet black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy about 800 million light years away, has suddenly erupted, giving off plumes of gas every 8.5 days before settling back to its normal, quiet state. The periodic hiccups are a new behavior that has not been observed in black holes until now. The scientists believe the most likely explanation for the outbursts stems from a second, smaller black hole t ..read more

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal. The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-r ..read more

By clocking the speed of stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, MIT physicists have found that stars further out in the galactic disk are traveling more slowly than expected compared to stars that are closer to the galaxy’s center. The findings raise a surprising possibility: The Milky Way’s gravitational core may be lighter in mass, and contain less dark matter, than previously thought. The new results are based on the team’s analysis of data taken by the Gaia and APOGEE instruments. Gaia is an orbiting space telescope that tracks the precise location, distance, and motion of more than 1 bill ..read more

Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres. The researchers propose that if a terrestrial planet has substantially less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere compared to other planets in the same system, it could be a sign of liquid water — and possibly life — on that planet’s surface. What’s more, this new signature is within the sights of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While scient ..read more

The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human. When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in physics. A family friend was a physicist, and she attributed her interest in the field to him. But it wasn't until a trip back to her mother's home country of Côte d'Ivoire that König learned her penchant for the subject had started much younger. No one in Côte d'Ivoire was surprised she was pursuing physics — they told her she'd been peering upward at the stars since she was a small child, wo ..read more

An extraordinary burst of high-energy light in the sky has pointed astronomers to a pair of metal-forging neutron stars 900 million light years from Earth. In a study appearing today in Nature, an international team of astronomers, including scientists at MIT, reports the detection of an extremely bright gamma-ray burst (GRB), which is the most powerful type of explosion known in the universe. This particular GRB is the second-brightest so far detected, and the astronomers subsequently traced the burst’s origin to two merging neutron stars. Neutron stars are the collapsed, ultradense cores of ..read more

The following article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, produced by a pair of colliding black holes. Since then, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LIGO and its sister detector in Europe, Virgo, hav ..read more

Assistant professor of physics Mikhail Ivanov will receive the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize, which he will share with Marko Simonović from the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) at the University of Florence, and Oliver Philcox from Columbia University and the Simons Foundation. The New Horizons Prize, which is given to promising early-career physicists and mathematicians making strides in their research fields, recognizes Ivanov, Simonovic, and Philcox “for contributions to our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe and the development of new too ..read more