Mit Kavli News Today

MIT astronomers observed the elusive starlight surrounding some of the earliest quasars in the universe. The findings may shed light on how the earliest supermassive black holes became so massive despite having a relatively short amount of cosmic time in which to grow.

A previously quiet black hole at the center of a distant galaxy has suddenly erupted, giving off plumes of gas every 8.5 days. These “hiccups” suggest black hole accretion disks may be more varied than previously thought, possibly containing other black holes, and even entire stars.

Scientists say astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres.

Astronomers detected an extremely bright gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful type of explosion known in the universe. It’s the second-brightest GRB so far identified, likely originating from two merging neutron stars.

Matthew Evans and Salvatore Vitale describe the Cosmic Explorer — a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory that is expected to pick up ripples in space-time from as far back as the early universe.

Most known exoplanets orbit closely around their stars, but the MIT-led TESS mission has discovered a rare system containing two planets with much more distant orbits, one of which has the longest orbital period that TESS has detected to date. The planets are circling TOI-4600, a nearby star that is 815 light years from Earth.

With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers discovered what may be the last three planets that the Kepler Space Telescope saw before it was retired.

Scientists have observed a star swallowing a planet for the first time. Earth will meet a similar fate in 5 billion years.

MIT astronomers discovered eight new echoing black hole binaries in our galaxy, enabling them to piece together a general picture of how a black hole evolves during an outburst.

Thesan is a new universe simulation that models the first billion years of the universe with the highest resolution, over the largest volume, to date.