Astronomers from MIT and other institutions have found that periodic eruptions from a supermassive black hole located in a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth could be caused by a, “second, smaller black hole slamming into a disk of gas and dust, or ‘accretion disk,’ surrounding the supermassive black hole, causing it to repeatedly ‘hiccup’ out matter,” writes Rob Lea for Space.com.
Prof. Long Ju and his colleagues observed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) when five layers of graphene were sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride, reports Dan Garisto for Nature. The findings are, “capturing physicists’ imagination because they are fundamentally new discoveries about how electrons behave,” writes Garisto.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, postdoc Rohan Naidu will be studying “some of the particularly large and red galaxies, [called little red dots,] that appear much brighter and more massive than theorists have expected galaxies at this epoch to be,” reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Scientific American. Naidu’s “program will seek to settle the debat about little red dots once and for all,” writes O’Callaghan.
Senior Research Scientist Lisa Barsotti speaks with MIT Technology Review reporter Sophia Chen about how she and her colleagues developed a new device that uses quantum squeezing to help the LIGO detectors identify more celestial events, such as black hole mergers and neutron star collisions. “With these latest squeezing innovations, installed last year, the collaboration expects to detect gravitational waves up to 65% more frequently than before,” Chen explains.
Gizmodo reporter Isaac Schultz writes that MIT scientists have captured images of heat moving through a superfluid, a phenomenon that “may explain how heat moves through certain rare materials on Earth and deep in space.” Schultz notes that the researchers believe their examination of heat flow in a superfluid “can be used to determine heat flow in high-temperature superconductors, or even in neutron stars, the roiling, ultra-dense relics of ordinary stars.”
For the first time, MIT physicists have successfully imaged how heat travels in a superfluid, known as a “second sound,” reports Darren Orf for Popular Mechanics. “While exotic superfluids may not fill up our lives (yet),” writes Orf, “understanding the properties of second wave movement could help questions regarding high-temperature superconductors (again, still at very low temperatures) or the messy physics that lie at the heart of neutron stars.”
Physics World reporter Tim Wogan spotlights how MIT physicists have developed a new technique for measuring the temperature of “second sound,” the movement of heat through a superfluid. “The work could help model a variety of scientifically interesting and poorly understood systems, including high temperature superconductors and neutron stars,” Wogan explains.
Prof. Ernest Moniz and his colleagues have designed a new consortium that plans to create an organized market for hydrogen, reports Llewellyn King for Forbes. This will allow hydrogen to become “a viable option in the pursuit of net-zero emissions,” writes King.
Prof. Erin Kara speaks with Quanta Magazine reporter Michael Greshko about her career as an observational astrophysicist and her work to better understand how black holes behave and reshape galaxies across the universe. “The thing that really got me excited about pursuing astronomy was the discovery aspect: It was just super thrilling to be the first person to look at light that was released from around a black hole a billion years ago,” says Kara.
Senior Lecturer Richard Price and his colleagues have scored a touchdown by uncovering the physics behind a spiral pass, “those perfect throws where the football leaves the player's hand and neatly spins as it arcs through the air,” reports NPR Short Wave host Regina Barber.
A more than $40 million investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano will significantly expand the center’s nanofabrication capabilities, reports Jon Chesto for The Boston Globe. The new equipment, which will also be available to scientists outside MIT, will allow “startups and students access to wafer-making equipment used by larger companies. These tools will allow its researchers to make prototypes of an array of microelectronic devices.”
MIT researchers have discovered 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs), “which are huge bursts of energy released as a star is shredded by a black hole,” reports Jess Thomson for Newsweek. “These new discoveries have also helped scientists learn more about what TDEs really are and where they occur,” explains Thomson. “The previous stock of TDEs had only been found in a rare form of galaxy known as a ‘post-starburst’ system, which once created a number of stars but has since stopped.”
MIT researchers have discovered that “stars at the edge of our home galaxy appear to be moving more slowly than expected,” reports Jess Thomson. This discovery “implies that the galaxy itself may be structured differently from how scientists first thought, with the core of the Milky Way possibly containing less dark matter and, therefore, being lighter in mass than first assumed,” explains Thomson.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have proposed a new method to look for primordial black holes (PMBs), reports Jackie Appel for Popular Mechanics. “If there are as many as the team thinks there should be, and they interact with gravity as we expect them to, they should be zooming around in a way that some of them should pass close by various objects in our solar system – including Earth,” explains Appel. “And if that happens, it should actually be enough to disturb the natural orbits of these objects in a way that we can measure.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have uncovered “a major advancement in the development of ‘error correction,’ the process of fighting the subatomic deterioration that makes most quantum computers today unhelpful for more than research purposes,” reports Derek Robertson for Politico.