2017 Nobel Prize in physics awarded to LIGO researchers
Rainer Weiss of MIT and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish of Caltech were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the first direct observation of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.
Physicists detect gravitational waves, proving Einstein right
A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding 1 billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Astronomers confirm contamination by stardust in detection of sky ripples
Stardust got in their eyes.
Prof. Alan Guth’s theory supported
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.
NASA detects planet dancing with pair of stars
From double sunrise to double sunset the show goes on, always changing.
20 light-years away, planet may be able to nurture life
It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.
Finland’s 100,000-year plan to banish its nuclear waste
It is, in the words of the Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, “a place we must remember to forget.”
Proton Beams Are Back on Track at Collider
Physicists returned to their future on Friday. About 10 p.m. outside Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment.
MIT Astronaut Returns to Space to Make Final Hubble Telescope Fixes
Seven astronauts blasted off Monday for one last dance with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Alum Will Fix Hubble For the Last Time
John Grunsfeld ’80 was sitting in an astronomical meeting in Atlanta in January of 2004 when he got a message to come back to headquarters in Washington to talk about the Hubble Space Telescope.
Researchers Locate Distant Solar System That Resembles Ours
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.
MIT Professors, Christensen Talk ‘Jumper’
In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights, chalk and star power, science and art squared off in a lecture hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one recent evening.
Caltech Unveils an Innovative But Costly Particle Accelerator Design
At a news conference in Beijing an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: A machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.