Astronomy

Barak Zackay, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has been awarded a 2017 Ph.D. Prize by the International Astronomical Union. The IAU prize recognizes outstanding scientific achievements in astronomy by Ph.D. students around the world. Zackay...

“The Noah’s Ark Egg is a way of making space colonies highly cost-effective. They’re very cheap, and also very powerful. They’re using miniaturization to spread life in the universe, not just for exploring," said Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus in...

The American Astronomical Society awarded former Members in the School of Natural Sciences with prestigious prizes for outstanding achievements in scientific research, instrument development, and writing.

Dark matter is as tangible as stars and planets to most astronomers. We routinely map it out. We conceive of galaxies as lumps of dark matter with dabs of luminous material. We understand the formation of cosmic structure, as well as the evolution...

Subo Dong, former Member (2009–13) in the School of Natural Sciences, has been awarded the Su-Shu Huang Prize of the Chinese Astronomical Society. Dong is recognized for his research achievements in the discovery and study of supernovae with wide...

Albert Einstein, one of the Institute's first Faculty members, argued that what we understand as gravity is, in fact, from the curvature of space and time — a hotly debated notion among physicists at the time.

Then came the solar eclipse of 1919 —...

On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible from a narrow ribbon of land—the “path of totality,” which stretches across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina. It will be the first total eclipse visible from the 48 contiguous states...

Much remains uncertain about how black holes reach supermassive girth and influence the universe around them. As such, astronomers want to analyze intermediate-mass black holes of about 100 to 10,000 solar masses that they expect would serve as the...

For the third time in less than two years, physicists have detected billion-year-old ripples in the fabric of space-time. The new recording, like the two others before it, was made using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)...

It’s a fascinating question, “How far can you see in the universe?”

As far as we know the universe is not infinite, there's actually a place where it ends. While astronomers have never actually seen the edge of the universe, they know it's out there...