Boston Globe reporter Laura Krantz visits MIT’s Haystack Observatory to learn more about the place where scientists played a key role in developing the first image of a black hole and created a supercomputer used to compile the image. Krantz notes that researchers at Haystack also study the Earth, not-far-away planets, and stars, and are creating devices to track the decay of icebergs.
Scientific American reporter Jeremy Hsu highlights how CSAIL researchers have developed a robot that can automatically sort recycling. The robot “uses soft Teflon ‘fingers,’ which have fingertip sensors to detect object size and stiffness,” Hsu explains.
Sky and Telescope editor Monica Young speaks with WBUR about how scientists from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories, including MIT researchers, may have detected a black hole colliding with a neutron star. Young explains that upgrades made to both observatories should enable investigation of not only individual cosmic events, but also the study of neutron stars and black holes as populations.
Adrian Cho of Science magazine writes that the possible black hole-neutron star merger spotted by LIGO and Virgo would be a “gem for scientists,” but work remains to confirm the signal. Prof. Salvatore Vitale, a LIGO member from MIT, tells Cho: “If you ask me, ‘Would you bet a coffee, your car, or your house on this?’ I would say, ‘I’d bet your car.’”
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum explores the five potential gravitational wave detections made by the LIGO and Virgo observatories in the last month. Prof. Salvatore Vitale explained that the possible detection of a black hole colliding with a neutron star could provide scientists with a better way to measure how quickly the universe is expanding.
“LIGO/VIRGO has opened up its notification process to the public,” explains Ars Technica reporter John Zimmer. “In short, anyone who’s interested can find out what LIGO is seeing within a day of when the LIGO scientists themselves do.”
The LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors have identified five new cosmic events since resuming operations last month, reports Sarah Lewin for Space.com. “The most exciting thing of the beginning of O3 [this third observation round] is that it's clear we are going from one event every few months to a few events every month," explains Prof. Salvatore Vitale.
MIT researchers have developed tiny robots powered by magnetic fields that can be used to bring drugs nanoparticles from the bloodstream into a tumor or disease site in the human body, reports the Xinhua news agency.
Inside Science reporter Yuen Yiu writes that MIT researchers have developed a new AI system that can summarize scientific research papers filled with technical terms. Yiu writes that the system “is a dramatic improvement from current programs, and could help scientists or science writers sift through large numbers of papers for the ones that catch their interest.”
Postdoctoral fellow Kazunori Akiyama speaks with Science News reporter Emily Conover about his work translating the data compiled from eight observatories around the world into the first image of a black hole. “I was really happy, really excited,” says Akiyama of his emotions after seeing the first rendering of a black hole.
Haystack research scientist speaks with Lowell Sun reporter Alana Melanson about how scientists at the Haystack Observatory made key contributions to creating the first-ever image of a black hole. “It's enormous volumes of data coming at you very, very fast -- much faster than you can record on a single hard drive,” says Fish of the vast quantities of data processed at Haystack to develop the image.
WCVB-TV’s Rhondella Richardson visits the MIT Haystack Observatory to learn more about how researchers there helped process the data that was compiled to produce the first image of a black hole. “It really does look exactly like what we expected it to, based on Einstein’s model of relativity,” explains Michael Hecht, Haystack’s associate director for research management. “There’s still a sense of awe.”
Science News reporter Maria Temming speaks with researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope about their work capturing the first picture of a black hole. Describing how the image was captured, Haystack research scientist Vincent Fish explains that the team was able to “reconstruct images, even though we don’t have 100 percent of the information, is because we know what images look like” in general.
Haystack postdoc Kazunori Akiyama speaks with Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum about the effort to capture the first image of a black hole, and notes that in the future, additional observations should shed light on how the region around the black hole is changing. “By accumulating observations over the next year with additional telescopes, we can identify what’s changing the black hole image,” Akiyama explains.
Fortune reporter Chris Morris explores how the Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first image of a black hole. “We’ve demonstrated that the EHT is the observatory to see a black hole on an event horizon scale,” says Haystack postdoc Kazunori Akiyama. “This is the dawn of a new era of black hole astrophysics.”