Research News

A small team led by Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has discovered an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO) at the edge of our solar system. The TNO is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, the same category as the much more well-known Pluto. The discovery has significant implications for our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and hypotheses that surround the existence of Planet Nine.

Frank and Peggy Taplin Member George N. Wong, Visitor Lia Medeiros, and Professor James Stone, all from the Institute's School of Natural Sciences, have developed an innovative technique to search for black hole light echoes. Their novel method, which will make it easier for the mass and the spin of black holes to be measured, represents a major step forward, since it operates independently of many of the other ways in which scientists have probed these parameters in the past.

A new study of ancient DNA by a team of international researchers, including Patrick Geary, Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies, provides insight into the development of and social structures within European rural communities following the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of these communities, about the formation of which little was previously known, would eventually become the basis for many modern European countries.

Sebastian Mizera, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and his collaborators, have used computational algebraic geometry to study predictions for particle physics experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The team’s results were published in Physical Review Letters in March. 

Patrick Geary, Emeritus Professor in the School of Historical Studies, together with Hungarian, Austrian, and German research groups, has published a paper in Nature, revealing the social dynamics of Avar-period steppe descent populations that settled in Europe's Carpathian Basin in the 6th century.

In a paper published today in Nature, Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences, and his collaborators have proposed a new theory that explains why a puzzling population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for ten billion years. 

The new AI Democracy Projects, co-founded by Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, engaged state and local election officials, journalists, and AI and election experts in some of the first testing and publicly available results of leading AI models’ safety regarding election information.

How has past climate variability contributed to human migrations and other forms of population movement? Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, is part of an interdisciplinary group, including historians, climatologists, and archeologists, that has developed a new tool, the “dahliagram,” to explore this question.

George Wong, Frank and Peggy Taplin Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and astrophysicists from Princeton University and Vanderbilt University have determined conclusively that energy close to the event horizon of M87’s central black hole is pushing outward, not inward—as one would normally assume with black holes.