Space

Artist’s conception of the rotating disk of hot, ionized gas surrounding Orion Source I, blocking the star from our view. A cool wind of gas is driven from the upper and lower surfaces of the disk and is sculpted into an hourglass shape by tangled magnetic field lines.

A massive star is born

Time-lapse movie shows that massive stars — which may hold clues about the origins of life — form like their smaller siblings.

January 11, 2010

Reporter’s Notebook: Where do we go from here?

At MIT forum, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine and other aerospace experts discuss the future of human spaceflight.

December 16, 2009

John Harrington PhD '58, first director of the MIT Center for Space Research, dies at 90

December 15, 2009

Robert Satcher and Randy Bresnik work outside of the International Space Station during the final spacewalk.

Astronaut and orthopedic surgeon Bobby Satcher tweets his NASA mission

The shuttle Atlantis brought seven astronauts including Robert Satcher ’86, PhD ’93, an orthopedic surgeon who tweeted through space, back to Earth on Nov. 27, after a 11-day NASA mission to stock the International Space Station.

November 30, 2009

Joe Davis ascends a walkway from the transmission dome suspended 500 feet above the Arecibo radiotelescope dish in Puerto Rico, after his transmission of a message to alien beings.

ET: Check your voicemail

New message beamed to the stars commemorates Earth’s first attempt to reach out to intelligent aliens

November 24, 2009

Sara Seager, the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

3 Questions: Sara Seager on searching for Earth-like planets

MIT planetary scientist discusses projects that aim to discover distant planets similar to our own, and what we can learn when we find them

November 23, 2009

Final journey to the Hubble Space Telescope

November 19, 2009

The panels show two possibilities for the bizarre orbit of HAT-P-7b. The top panel shows a "polar" orbit in which the planet goes over the north and south poles of the star. The bottom panel shows a "retrograde" orbit in which the planet revolves in the opposite direction as the star's rotation. Astronomers cannot distinguish these two possibilities because the exact orientation of the star's rota...

A faraway planet intrigues

An exoplanet with an extremely tilted orbit raises new interest in stellar astronomy.

November 12, 2009

The IBEX satellite maps the boundary layer of the sun's bubble, or heliosheath. This map shows this data plotted on an all-sky image, revealing the bright ribbon-like structure (in greens, yellows and reds) swirling across the sky.

Bursting the sun's bubble

New observations indicate the heliosphere — the sun's sphere of influence — has a different shape than theorists had expected.

October 16, 2009

Asteroids honor and motivate young scientists

Since 2001, MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Ceres Connection program, in conjunction with the International Astronomical Union, has celebrated more than 1,500 science fair winners by naming minor planets in their honor.

October 6, 2009

These images show a recent crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as seen by a NASA instrument aboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. On the left, an ordinary image taken by infrared light. On the right, the light blue shows water-rich minerals, associated with material ejected from the crater.

3 questions: Ben Weiss discusses what a wet moon might mean

The planetary scientist explores the implications of the recent discovery of water on the lunar surface.

September 30, 2009

A satellite image of internal waves (with a wavelength of about 2 kilometers), which are generated by flow from the the Atlantic ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, at the east of Gibraltar and Ceuta.

Hidden waves pack a big punch

Thomas Peacock sheds light on an odd but powerful phenomenon of sea and sky

September 18, 2009

Maria Zuber, chair of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science

In Profile: Maria Zuber

Planetary scientist is driven by the thrill of exploring uncharted territory

September 18, 2009

An inside view of a neutron detector in development at MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Pappalardo Fellow Jocelyn Monroe, is seen through the detector.

The hunt for dark matter

MIT physicists are working on new detectors that may, at last, help them find the elusive particles thought to constitute up to a quarter of the universe.

September 17, 2009

This artist's conception of the double-star system DI Herculis illustrates the key findings from the new research. Spectroscopic observations showed that the two stars are both tipped over almost horizontally, relative to the plane of their orbits around each other. Because they are rotating rapidly which creates equatorial bulges, the tidal interactions between the two slows down a regular variat...

Oddball stars explained

New observations solve longstanding mystery of tipped rotation. In addition to shedding light on how binary stars form, the explanation knocks down a possible challenge to Einstein's theory of relativity.