Universe

Juna Kollmeier, former Junior Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, wants to understand the substance of the universe: What forms space structures like galaxies, supermassive black holes, and the intergalactic medium that fills the...

Melissa Pandika of OZY profiles theoretical physicist Tracy Slatyer, former Member in the School of Natural Sciences, whose work, Pandika writes, "could bring physicists closer to detecting dark matter signals by better enabling them to tease these...

Albert Einstein said that the “most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He was right to be astonished. Human brains evolved to be adaptable, but our underlying neural architecture has barely changed since our...

The life of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, astrophysicist and former Member in the School of Natural Sciences, was celebrated with Google Doodle's October 19 animation. Published on what would have been Chandrasekhar's 107th birthday, the Doodle is a...

Perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question that you can ask in science is: "Why are we here?"

To understand the universe, we have to bring together the two key ideas that are governing modern physics. On the one hand, we have Einstein’s...

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...

Lawrence Krauss, Member (2005) in the School of Natural Sciences, asks "What if the world around us is just a shadow of reality?" in the New Yorker's Elements.

... The notion that the world of our experience is an accident of our particular...

Welcome to the Universe (Princeton University Press, 2016) by Michael A. Strauss, Member in the School of Natural Sciences (1991–95), Neil deGrasse Tyson, and J. Richard Gott has been cited on the New York Times's Best Sellers in Science list....

Like many astrophysicists, Sara Seager sometimes has a problem with her perception of scale. Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and that each might contain hundreds of billions of stars, can make the lives of astrophysicists...

For 80 years, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one...