“Trying to understand Hawking’s discovery better has been a
source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are
probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still
feels new,” said Edward Witten,
Charles Simonyi Professor...
The American Astronomical Society awarded former Members in the School of Natural Sciences with prestigious prizes for outstanding achievements in scientific research, instrument development, and writing.
Since 2009, astrophysicists have been trying to explain the
abundance of gamma radiation diffusing from the center of the Milky
Way, a production of high-energy radiation far beyond what the
known gamma-ray sources suggest. Tracy Slatyer, former...
Everything that humans have seen up until now exists in the
4.9 per cent of the universe that interacts
with light. The rest is hidden from view. Most of it, physicists
believe—68.3 per cent—is dark energy, an enigmatic force that
drives the...
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...
Dark matter is as tangible as stars and planets to most
astronomers. We routinely map it out. We conceive of galaxies as
lumps of dark matter with dabs of luminous material. We understand
the formation of cosmic structure, as well as the evolution...
For as long as modern science has existed, scientists have
attempted to answer such unanswerable questions by trying to either
reconcile science and religion, like Galileo did in defending his
theories against the Inquisition and Ada Lovelace did in...
After a decade of searching and verification, a research team
revealed a new exoplanet, and you could say it’s coming in hot. The
orb is the hottest giant exoplanet ever found, according to a
study published in Nature. “KELT-9b” intrigues...
For the third time in less than two years, physicists have
detected billion-year-old ripples in the fabric of space-time. The
new recording, like the two others before it, was made using the
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)...
What struck me was some regularity in the anomaly. The
rotational velocities were not just larger than expected, they
became constant with radius. Why? Sure, if there was dark matter,
the speed of stars would be greater, but the rotation curves...
