Prof. Nergis Mavalvala speaks with NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce about recent upgrades made to the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which should increase their ability to sense previously undiscovered cosmic events. "That's how discovery happens," explains Mavalvala. "You turn on a new instrument, you point it out at the sky, and you see something that you had no idea existed."
Financial Times reporter Clive Cookson writes that researchers from MIT and Penn State have developed a technique to make clear droplets produce iridescent colors. Cookson explains that the phenomenon is a previously unknown example of ‘structural color,’ produced not by pigments but the internal reflections of light within the tiny droplets.”
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about how she and her colleagues are working on a new technology called squeezed light, which could enable LIGO to see even more of the cosmos. Mavalvala explains that squeezed light is “a somewhat exotic quantum state of light that we engineer in our labs to improve the sensitivity of LIGO.”
Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that researchers determined how fast a supermassive black hole spins by measuring a star being swallowed by the black hole. Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham explains that, “this measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant.”
Astronomers from MIT have detected echoes in X-ray flares emitted by a black hole consuming stellar material, writes Charles Q. Choi for Space.com. The findings “might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes,” writes Choi, “but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that a team of researchers, including MIT scientists, have detected fast radio bursts (FRB) coming from a distant galaxy. Coldewey explains that the researchers used the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment radio telescope, which “points at the whole sky and chooses where to ‘look’ using software,” to identify 13 new FRBs.
Nature reporter Alexandra Witze highlights the TESS satellite’s success in uncovering new exoplanets outside our solar system. Senior research scientist George Ricker feels, “TESS works better than team members had dared to dream,” Witze writes, adding that “its four cameras can see objects 20% fainter, and focus more sharply, than originally expected.”
NASA’s MIT-led TESS mission has discovered a new exoplanet orbiting a star 53 light years from Earth, reports Mike Wall for Space.com. The “sub-Neptune” planet is “about three times bigger than Earth, which means it's likely gaseous rather than rocky,” writes Wall.
CNN reporter Ashley Strickland writes that NASA’s planet-hunting satellite TESS has discovered another exoplanet 53 light years away. Strickland explains that the exoplanet orbits “a bright neighboring star in the Reticulum constellation, with a 36-day orbit and a surface temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks with Forbes contributor Peter High about his work trying to ensure that AI technologies are implemented in a way that is beneficial to society. “If we plan accordingly and steer technology in the right direction, we can create an inspiring future that will allow humanity to flourish in a way that we have never seen before,” says Tegmark.
NASA’s MIT-led TESS mission has discovered a new exoplanet that is about three times the size of Earth, reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times. “There was quite some detective work involved, and the right people were there at the right time,” explains postdoctoral fellow Diana Dragomir. “But we were lucky, and we caught the signals, and they were really clear.”
Verge reporter Loren Grush writes that NASA’s MIT-led TESS mission has discovered a third exoplanet. “The important thing about this system that’s especially unique is it’s near to us,” says postdoc Diana Dragomir. “What that means simply is we can study this system in detail. We can measure the mass of the planet and measure things about the star.”
Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney spotlights Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s discovery that graphene can act as a superconductor when twisted to a magic angle. “I haven’t seen this much excitement in the graphene field since its initial discovery,” said ChunNing Jeanie Lau, a professor at Ohio State University, of the impact of Jarillo-Herrero’s findings.