Scott Tremaine

On May 3, 2019, Scott Tremaine, Richard Black Professor in the IAS School of Natural Sciences, gave a lecture on the evidence for a supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, denoted Sagittarius A*. The talk focuses on what we know...

As part of Ideas: Celebrating 2017–18, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor, Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, Johan Heilbron, Louise and John Steffens...

On April 26, 2018, the Institute community gathered to celebrate Ideas 2017–18 with talks by IAS Members––deep ideas explained in under 20 minutes with no slides or chalk––followed by audience discussions moderated by Faculty. The program concluded...

Matias Zaldarriaga, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, Scott Tremaine, Richard Black Professor in the School, Member Doron Kushnir, and Junior Visiting Professor Nadia Zakamska discuss LIGO's recent detection of gravitational waves...

Black holes are among the strangest predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity: regions of spacetime in which gravity is so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape. More precisely, a black hole is a singularity in spacetime...

Pluto, the ninth planet in our solar system1 was discovered in 1930, the same year the Institute was founded. While the Institute hosted more than five thousand members in the following sixty-five years, not a single new planet was discovered during...

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...

For slightly over a year, I have largely put aside my longtime interests in the foundations of quantum mechanics and in particle physics, and have been working on dark matter. This interest came about in two different ways. The first was a paper on...

One of the remarkable discoveries in astrophysics has been the recognition that the material we see and are familiar with, which makes up the earth, the sun, the stars, and everyday objects, such as a table, is only a small fraction of all of the...