Alongside the release of the image, scientists dropped six papers documenting how they created the image and what they’ve already learned about the black hole at the center of M87.
In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together to solve the puzzle.
It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.
As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.
JoAnne Hewett’s most recent paper is a collaboration between physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.
In March 2007, members of a US National Science Foundation panel went on a whirlwind bus tour of potential sites for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Here's an account of that trip by Peter Fisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.