Astrophysics

In the public lecture “The Latest News from the Cosmos,” Matias Zaldarriaga, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, explores the most detailed map of the infant universe to date. Publicly released on March 21, 2013, the map shows relic...

In the public lecture “Gone with the Wind: Black Holes and their Gusty Influence on the Birth of Galaxies,” sponsored by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study (AMIAS), Nadia Zakamska, former John N. Bahcall Fellow and Member...

Does the world embody beautiful ideas?

Pythagoras and Plato intuited that the world should embody beautiful ideas; Newton and Maxwell demonstrated how the world could embody beautiful ideas, in specific impressive cases. Finally, in the twentieth...

Until a couple of decades ago, the only planets we knew existed were the nine in our Solar System. In the last twenty-five years, we’ve lost one of the local ones (Pluto, now classified as a “minor planet”) and gained about three thousand candidate...

The desire to discover distant, rare, and strange objects dominated twentieth-century astronomy, for which increasingly larger and more sensitive telescopes were constructed.

The act of carrying out this objective has brought enormous—and somewhat...

The stability of the solar system is one of the oldest problems in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton. After Newton discovered his famous laws of motion and gravity, he used these to determine the motion of a single planet around the...

In this lecture, given at a Friends Form held at the Institute on May 11, 2011, Marilena LoVerde, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, explains theories of evolutionary history of the universe and how we use current astrophysical data to...

Why is the expansion of the universe speeding up, instead of being slowed by the gravitational attraction of galaxies and dark matter? What is the history of the Milky Way galaxy and of the chemical elements in its stars? Why are the planetary...