Professor Jesse Thaler has been named director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), effective Aug. 1. He succeeds Professor Bolek Wyslouch, who directed LNS for the past decade. Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who combines techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. 'In his research, Jesse has done pioneering work on particle jets at the Large Hadron Collider and is a leader in combining AI and machine learning with fundamental particle physics,' says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. 'The collaborative nature of his research programs will serve the Laboratory for Nuclear Science as science enters a new era of AI-driven discovery.' Thaler is the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics ' a Leinweber Institute (CTP-LI). Since 2020, he has served as inaugural director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, or IAIFI, which was recently renewed for another five years. Mike Williams, professor of physics, will succeed Thaler as IAIFI director. LNS is also poised to pursue new research projects through the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, which has a focus on AI-enabled scientific discovery....

After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw 'Bolek' Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS. 'LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,' says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. 'Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams' critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.' The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015. Since Bolek's appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory's research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged....

But rather than a tunnel of nothing, a black hole is actually something ' and a lot of it. The densest objects in the universe, black holes exert tremendous gravitational pull, gathering in the surrounding fabric of space and time, and generating huge disks of matter that whirl toward a black hole before falling in, past the point of no return. 'It used to be that we didn't have eyes on systems all the time,' says Erin Kara, an associate professor of physics at MIT. 'Now we're seeing that they can turn on and off at rates that are much faster than we ever thought possible. We see things are getting sucked in toward black holes faster than we thought, perhaps due to stars whipping around and getting trapped in a black hole's accretion disk.' Kara and her group in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are at the forefront of black hole physics. She is using data from telescopes in space and on the ground to study the properties of black holes, especially supermassive black holes ' the ultradense giants at the centers of galaxies. Supermassive black holes are the engines of galaxy formation. Kara, who recently earned tenure at MIT, seeks to connect the extreme physics of black holes with how galaxies such as our own Milky Way come to be....

Stars form when vast clouds of cold gas in space collapse under their own gravity. But not all gas collapses, and not all clouds form stars equally efficiently. A long-standing puzzle in astrophysics is what controls this process ' and a leading suspect has been the role of magnetic fields, which thread through interstellar gas like an invisible scaffolding. A new open-access study led by researchers at MIT Haystack Observatory, published in The Astrophysical Journal, has now traced this scaffolding in unprecedented detail in DR21, one of the most active stellar nurseries within 5,000 light-years of the sun. The results show that magnetic fields don't simply exist in DR21 ' they actively shape how material flows into the cloud's dense central spine, where new massive stars are being born. "The magnetic field acts like a set of railroad tracks," says Thushara Pillai, research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory and lead author of the study. "Gas flows along the tracks toward the central ridge, building it up over time. Across the tracks, the field resists motion. So the field doesn't stop star formation ' it channels it."...