Astrophysics

Welcome to the Universe (Princeton University Press, 2016) by Michael A. Strauss, Member in the School of Natural Sciences (1991–95), Neil deGrasse Tyson, and J. Richard Gott has been cited on the New York Times's Best Sellers in Science list....

One gets the sense that Freeman Dyson has seen everything. It’s not just that at 92 he’s had a front row seat on scientific breakthroughs for the past century, or that he’s been friends and colleagues with many of the giants of 20th-century physics...

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...