Natural Sciences

For the first time in human history, the world laid eyes on an image of a black hole and the ghostly shadow of its event horizon. Yet despite this illuminating breakthrough, many more questions remain unanswered of the ubiquitous dark structures...

Scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) recently submitted a paper announcing the discovery of six new binary black hole mergers that exceed the detection thresholds defined by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC), the group responsible for...

Listen to the BBC Radio 3 broadcast by Director's Visitor (2018) Sally Marlow, who interviews IAS Director Robbert Dijkgraaf, and Professors Joan Wallach Scott, Freeman J. Dyson, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Myles W. Jackson.

James M. Stone, a world-renowned computational astrophysicist, whose research is focused on fluid dynamics—in particular numerical solutions to the equations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in an astrophysical context—has been appointed to the Faculty...

On April 18, Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on the AskScience Reddit forum, coordinated in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, a co-organizer with the IAS and MoMath of the National Math Festival, which will take place in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, May 4, 2019.

On Wednesday, April 24, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, gave a special public lecture at Cornell University.

Arkani-Hamed's lecture, "What’s the Point of Doing Fundamental Science?," asked why we should dedicate...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Project, which aims to capture the first-ever image of a black hole, will make a major announcement on Wednesday, April 10, at 9:00 a.m. EST (13:00 UTC) that can be viewed live from the player above.

With properties...

Edward van den Heuvel, Visitor (1974) in the School of Natural Sciences, has been awarded, with Alexander V. Tutukov and Lev R. Yungelson, the 2018 Viktor Ambartsumian International Science Prize.

The prize, which comes with a monetary award of about...

"The world has all kinds of long-term problems, some of which might seem impossible to solve. So it’s important to have a group of people who, over centuries, give a concrete template for how to go about grappling with and ultimately conquering...

Albert Einstein, IAS Founding Faculty member, and Stephen Hawking are two of the most influential scientific figures in recent history, contributing enormously to our current understanding of the universe. As the one-year anniversary of Hawking’s...