The disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury, although it circles about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun, completing an orbit every 30.5 hours. At such close proximity to its star, the planet is likely covered in magma that is boiling off into space. As the roasting planet whizzes around its star, it is shedding an enormous amount of surface minerals and effectively evaporating away. The astronomers spotted the planet using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led mission that monitors the nearest stars for transits, or periodic dips in starlight that could be signs of orbiting exoplanets. The signal that tipped the astronomers off was a peculiar transit, with a dip that fluctuated in depth every orbit. 'The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to 9 million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet's entire orbit,' says Marc Hon, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. It appears that the planet is disintegrating at a dramatic rate, shedding an amount of material equivalent to one Mount Everest each time it orbits its star. At this pace, given its small mass, the researchers predict that the planet may completely disintegrate in about 1 million to 2 million years....

MIT Professors Andrew Vanderburg and Ariel White have been honored as Committed to Caring for their attentiveness to student needs and for creating a welcoming and inclusive culture. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond. Vanderburg is the Bruno B. Rossi Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics and is affiliated with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research focuses on studying exoplanets. Vanderburg is interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying these planets to learn their detailed properties. Ever respectful of students' boundaries between their research and personal life, Vanderburg leads by example in striking a healthy balance. A nominator commented that he has recently been working on his wildlife photography skills, and has even shared some of his photos at the group's meetings. Balancing personal and work life is something that almost everyone Vanderburg knows struggles with, from undergraduate students to faculty. 'I encourage my group members to spend free time doing things they enjoy outside of work,' Vanderburg says, 'and I try to model that balanced behavior myself.'...

Astronomers have announced the discovery of 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, raising questions about why the planet has such a huge number of satellites. Investigating this phenomenon could provide us with crucial knowledge about the evolution of our Solar System. The discovery is 'fascinating', says Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada, who also contributed observations that led to the finding but did not contribute to the forthcoming paper about them. 'It just shows how much is out there.' The moons, which were officially recognized this week by the International Astronomical Union, will be described in a paper led by astronomer Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei, Taiwan. The study will be published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. Unlike our own Moon, which is 3,475 kilometres wide, these small rocks are just a few kilometres across in size. They swing around Saturn in chaotic, distant orbits, often moving in reverse relative to the planet's major moons, such as Titan and Rhea....

New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole. The most widely accepted theory of galactic evolution holds that supermassive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Large Magellanic Cloud could host one. When x-ray telescopes or observatories have been trained on smaller clusters like the Large Magellanic Cloud, they have found no signatures associated with black hole activity. But then came the hypervelocity stars. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have spotted fast-traveling stars with enough acceleration to be ejected from their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves at about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star travels up to 10 times faster. Experts think such stars appear by being 'catapulted outward' by a supermassive gravitational structure under the Hills mechanism'which is where a binary star system interacts with a black hole, with one star captured by the black hole and the other flung away from it....