Astrophysics

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...

Neta Bahcall, Member (1982–83) in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses the forty-year effort of John Bahcall, Richard Black Professor in the School from 1971 until his death in 2005, to predict the rate of neutrinos from the Sun. Watch the talk...

In Black Hole Blues: And Other Songs From Outer Space the astrophysicist and novelist Janna Levin chronicles the ­decades-long development of a machine that could detect gravitational waves—a quest marked by the highest degree of human intelligence...