WGBH reporter Edgar Herwick visits the Haystack Observatory to learn about how astronomers are using radio telescopes to try to capture the first image of a black hole. "It’s a mind-blowing adventure, what the human mind and the human imagination can do with technology and science and creativity,” explains Haystack's Michael Hecht.
MIT researchers have observed a black hole devouring a star, reports Torah Kachur for CBC News. After looking at about a year’s worth of data, researchers found that the “star was getting pulled apart and literally shredded into a debris stream that spiraled around the center of this black hole,” writes Kachur.
Elizabeth Howell writes for Scientific American that a team of researchers, including scientists from MIT, have observed that when a black hole consumes a star there is a burst of electromagnetic activity. Howell explains that the “new research suggests that interactions among the debris could generate the optical and UV emission.”
MIT researchers have observed a black hole devouring a star almost 300 million light years away, writes Andy Rosen for The Boston Globe. “We are actually mapping out in real time what is happening as the star is getting ripped [apart] and it’s falling onto the black hole,” says postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham.
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.
Jonathan Amos reports for the BBC News that scientists around the world are close to obtaining the first image of a black hole. Data from multiple observatories will be compiled at MIT’s Haystack Observatory where “very smart imaging algorithms have had to be developed to make sense of the [Event Horizon Telescope]'s observations,” writes Amos.
Wired reporter Kathryn Nave speaks with research scientist Sheperd Doeleman about the Event Horizon Telescope project, which is aimed at imaging a black hole using telescopes stationed around the world. "We have good evidence there are black holes at the center of galaxies just from the orbits of stars around them, but we've never actually seen one," Doeleman explains.
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.”
Advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave detection system developed by MIT and Caltech, is featured on a Popular Science list of the greatest innovations of the year. Shannon Palus and Jenn Schwartz write that observing gravitational waves “lets scientists plot the history of the universe and spot events like supernovas.”
Prof. Rainer Weiss speaks with Marco Werman of PRI about his childhood, what inspired his interest in science, and black holes. "One of the dreams I would have, had Einstein been still alive, is to tell him about this,” said Weiss, of the successful detection of gravitational waves. “I would have loved to have seen what he would have thought.”
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."