Astrophysics

Our Universe is filled with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation having an almost perfect black body spectrum with a temperature of To=2.7K. The number density of photons in our Universe exceeds the number density of electrons by a factor of...

http://www.ias.edu/sns/~seminar/colloquia.shtml

General Relativity is one of two foundational pillars of physics, yet gravity is the most weakly tested of the fundamental forces. Using the pristine solar system as a laboratory, we bump into this pillar to see if it might fall. This talk will...

Failed supernovae, where core collapse leads to the formation of a black hole without an external supernova, have always been one of the possible outcomes when a massive star dies. The observed properties of the dying, progenitor stars, mismatches...

On March 21, 2013, the most detailed map of the infant universe to date was publicly released, showing relic radiation from the Big Bang, imprinted when the universe was just 380,000 years old. This was the first release of cosmological data from the...

Does the world embody beautiful ideas? This is a question that people have thought about for a long time. Pythagoras and Plato intuited that the world should embody beautiful ideas; Newton and Maxwell demonstrated how the world could embody beautiful...

Scott Tremaine, Richard Black Professor, School of Natural Sciences
One of the remarkable successes of twentieth century astronomy was the demonstration that the laws of physics derived in the laboratory can successfully describe a wide range of...