Elena Murchikova

April 2022 saw Hollywood come to the Institute as filming for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer biopic took place on campus. This article, featuring comments from Members and Visitors across all four IAS Schools, provides insight into what it was like to share the campus with the production team and highlights our community's reactions to the film.

Researchers have shown for the first time in a single model how gas travels in the center of the Milky Way—from being blown off by stars to falling into the galaxy's central black hole.

Update (06/17/2022): This research is now published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be accessed here.

Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred and the perception of constant illumination is a mere illusion.

"Sgr A*, the 4.6-million-solar-mass black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way, is normally a fairly quiet beast. The black hole slowly feeds on accreting material in the galactic center — but this food source is sparse, and Sgr A*’s...

“The most spectacular element of the Penrose calculations is that he showed that if you are close enough to a black hole, time ends. It is the mirror image of the Big Bang.”

—Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor (Wall Street...

"'This is the first indication of accretion with a direction of rotation,' says Lena Murchikova, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and lead author of a study reporting the new results, published...

A team of researchers, led by Lena Murchikova, Bezos Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has made new strides in understanding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*. The results, to be published in N...