Cosmology

Rashid Sunyaev, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, has been awarded the Max Planck Medal, the highest prize in theoretical physics granted by the German Physical Society (DPG), in recognition of “numerous and...

The Gruber Foundation and International Astronomical Union (IAU) has announced that Matias Zaldarriaga, Richard Black Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, is a recipient of the 2021 Gruber Cosmology Prize. Zaldarriaga shares the honor with M...

A new study, conducted to better understand the origin of the universe, has provided insight into some of the most enduring questions in fundamental physics: How can the Standard Model of particle physics be extended to explain the cosmological...

Physicist Brian Keating details the process by which breakthrough scientific results can be reached and announced, then peer reviewed and debunked. Though his team believed they'd proven cosmological inflation, a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery if...

“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...

Melissa Pandika of OZY profiles theoretical physicist Tracy Slatyer, former Member in the School of Natural Sciences, whose work, Pandika writes, "could bring physicists closer to detecting dark matter signals by better enabling them to tease these...

Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, far from an office or a chalkboard. Months ago, Quanta Magazine set out to photograph some of the world’s most accomplished scientists and mathematicians, including Eva Silverstein, former...

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...

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...

There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists, including former Members Stefano Casertano (1983–87), George Efstathiou (1986), and Lawrence Krauss (2005), and former Visitor David Spergel (2014) in the School...