Black holes

MIT researchers have discovered space matter that has been ‘missing’ since the 1990s using Fast Radio Bursts, individual flashes of radio waves traveling through space and coming from the distant universe, reports WCVB 5’s Cindy Fitzgibbon. “The takeaway of the study is that by discovering the distribution of the missing matter around galaxies, we have found evidence for strong activities in galaxies,” says graduate student Haochen Wang, a co-author on the study. “In other words, galaxies are busier and messier than we thought.” 

Prof. Salvatore Vitale and graduate student Cailin Plunkett join John Batchelor and David Livingston, hosts of the Hotel Mars podcast, to discuss their discovery that 14% of black holes were created from the merger of two smaller ones, and their goal to use gravitational wave detectors to uncover the origins of the black hole in the Milky Way. “In ten years [with added gravitational wave technology and observatories], we’ll go from seeing the first gravitational wave ever to seeing them irrespective of where they happen in the universe—which would of course, be fantastic,” says Vitale.  

New Scientist’s Jacklin Kwan highlights Prof. Christoph Kehle’s work demonstrating that extremal black holes, a variety of black hole that has zero temperature, could exist. “Extremal black holes were thought of as an idealised, unattainable limit: something you could write down as a solution, but which could never be reached [through any real physical] process, but we proved that wrong,” says Kehle. 

By studying ‘smears’ in fast radio bursts, fleeting flashes of radiation, MIT researchers discovered diffuse clouds of baryonic gas may contain the missing ordinary matter in the universe, writes Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee. “These diffuse clouds may be flung outside galaxies through black hole jets,” Lee explains. 

After analyzing data from the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA gravitational wave detectors, MIT researchers have found that 14% of black holes may be second-generation, formed by the merger of two smaller black holes, writes Gayoung Lee for Gizmodo. The scientists “created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above,” Lee explains.  

Prof. David Kaiser joins GBH “Particles of Thought” podcast host Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi to discuss his hunt for primordial black holes. “It’s a lot easier to find stuff coming off of a very bright, hot source, than a cold, dim one. So, the Hawking temperature of a black hole that has the same mass as our sun, or a little bigger would be so cold we would literally never be able to measure [its] radiation,” says Kaiser. “You’ll never see it [Hawking Radiation] from stellar collapse black holes, you’ll never see it from supermassive black holes, or even colder. The only hope to ever see it would be a smaller mass black hole.”

Scientific American reporter Clara Moskowitz spotlights a new study by Prof. Seth Lloyd that explores the feasibility of black holes sending information back in time. In the study, Lloyd and his colleagues calculate how much information can be sent backward via closed timelike curves, intensely bending, rotating space found around spinning black holes. “Spacetime can curve around so much that you can be innocently going forward in time and then you meet yourself in the past,” says Lloyd. 

Prof. David Kaiser and graduate student Alexandra Klipfel speak with New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye about their theory that a neutrino detected zipping through the Mediterranean Sea in February 2023 may have come from an exploding primordial black hole. Kaiser and Klipfel "concluded that if primordial black holes were the explanation for long-sought dark matter, scientists should expect about 40 black-hole explosions to occur each year in every cubic light-year near the Milky Way,” Overbye notes. 

Prof. Salvatore Vitale and graduate student Jack Heinzel speak with Scientific American reporter K.R. Callaway about the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration’s latest catalog of gravitational wave detections, which “more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes.” Says Heinzel: “We’re learning a lot of things that are qualitative and phenomenological from the catalog. Starting to see all these different structures emerge is pretty fascinating.”

Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, and Prof. Salvatore Vitale join Edgar B. Herwick III of GBH’s Curiosity Desk to discuss the science behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and how close we are to unraveling the secrets of the early universe. LIGO has provided the ability to “observe the universe in ways that have never been done before,” says Mavalvala. 

Prof. Anna-Christina Eilers and postdoctoral associate Rohan Naidu speak with Scientific American reporter Rebecca Boyle about the discovery and study of Little Red Dots, mysterious, red spots that showed up in images from the James Webb Space Telescope.  The dots, which astronomers dated to 600 million years after the big bang, “are in every single image the telescope takes,” says Naidu. “We have to find out about them if we want to tell a complete story about the early universe." 

Quanta Magazine reporter Jonathan O’Callaghan spotlights Prof. David Kaiser and graduate student Alexandra Klipfel, and their work searching for evidence of primordial black holes. “Very little mass gets radiated over the majority of the black hole’s lifetime,” explains Klipfel. “But then, right at the end, it emits a majority of its mass in a very rapid explosion. It heats up really, really quickly, a runaway process that ends in a big explosion of ultra-high-energy particles.”

A new analysis conducted by postdoctoral associate Rohan Naidu and his colleagues has found evidence that suggests “little red dot” galaxies may contain baby black holes, reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “In ordinary black holes, what you actually see with your eyes is the tip of the iceberg of the total energy that is coming out of the system, but the little red dots we now understand should really be thought of as these puffed-up black hole stars,” says Naidu. “It seems that most of their energy is coming out at these wavelengths that we see with our eyes, so what you see is what you get.” 

The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project commemorates the life and legacy of Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics and “LIGO’s heart and soul.” Said Weiss of the significance of detecting gravitational waves: "The discovery isn't the measurement of the gravitational waves…it's the black holes. That's absolutely spectacular... that this exists, and if you see a couple more, then you could say something about the universe. It's something new that we're going to be able to say about the universe. It's spectacular. To me, that's the big discovery."

Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, joins Bob McDonald of CBC’s “Quirks & Quarks” to discuss how 10 years after LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves the observatories are still “helping scientists better understand the life cycles of stars, the nature of gravity, and transforming the way we explore the farthest reaches of space.” Mavalvala shares: "Scientists have been able to design and construct these instruments that are capable of measuring imperceptibly small changes in spacetime distance, and in the past 10 years the sensitivity of these instruments has improved. That’s what is allowing us to make greater discoveries.”