Astrophysics

Un-Biased Cosmology from Biased Tracers, a workshop held at the Institute from September 24–26, 2012, explored the astrophysical issues associated with simple bias models, which ignore crucial clustering properties and can neither describe data nor...

In 1913, Victor Hess measured the background level of atmospheric ionization while ascending with a balloon. By doing so, he discovered that Earth is continuously bathed in ionizing radiation. These cosmic rays primarily consist of protons and...

Light is the great unifier. John Wheeler, the beloved Princeton physicist, used to draw the universe as a big capital U with a little eye on one leg, signifying that we, human beings, are the eyes of the universe looking back at itself. The universe...

The theoretical astrophysicist and Princeton University professor is well known for his work on NASA’s 2001 Microwave Anisotropy Probe—he conceptualized the mission and deciphered the radio telescope’s data to measure the age of the universe, the...

On the evening of November 11, 1572, twenty-six-year-old astronomer Tycho Brahe was about to make a discovery that would change his life and consequentially boost the scientific revolution significantly. While casually staring at the night sky, he...

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 story of the “data explosion” is by now a familiar one: throughout science, engineering, commerce, and government, we are collecting and storing data at an ever-increasing rate. We can hardly read the news or turn on a computer without...

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...