Caltech marked several major milestones in 2025, while also stepping up for the local community after the January fires. Researchers deployed air-quality sensors across the Altadena burn zone, hosted public webinars on post-fire safety, and demonstrated how Institute expertise can serve neighbors in crisis.
That same adaptability showed up globally. In Iceland, researchers repurposed unused fiber-optic cables for distributed acoustic sensing to provide early warnings of lava eruptions. Caltech News recapped the year, including:
LIGO at 10 A decade after its first gravitational wave detection, LIGO recorded its biggest black hole collision yet: a merger producing a final black hole 225 times the Sun’s mass. The observatory has now detected roughly 300 black hole mergers with its international partners.
Quantum at Scale Researchers assembled an array of 6,100 qubits—the most ever—by trapping neutral atoms in a laser grid. The AWS Center for Quantum Computing on campus debuted its Ocelot chip, while other teams developed sound-based quantum memory storage and new methods for multiplexing quantum information.
AI Across Fields Machine learning-powered advances from breast imaging diagnostics to noise reduction in LIGO detectors. The November AI+Science conference with University of Chicago brought together researchers exploring how artificial intelligence accelerates discovery.
Space and Sky NASA’s Caltech-led SPHEREx mission launched to study the early universe and interstellar ices. The Next Generation Palomar Spectrograph began operations after seven years of development. And ZTF helped spot 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet.