News

Junior, Cole Meyer Awarded the Outstanding Presentation Award for Princeton Research Day 2023
May 15, 2023

Cole Meyer, junior in the Astrophysics department was awarded the Outstanding Presentation Award for Princeton Research Day 2023!  The presentation, "Estimates of heating rates in the near-Sun environment” was based on Cole’s Junior Paper work with Riddhi Bandyopadhyay, Associate Research…

How to see the invisible: Using the dark matter distribution to test our cosmological model
April 3, 2023

Princeton researchers led by graduate student Roohi Dalal, in collaboration with astronomers at Carnegie Mellon University and various institutions in Japan, announced today new cosmological results from an analysis of deep imaging data from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey.  Measuring the weak gravitational lensing signal from 25…

Four Undergraduate Astrophysics Majors Win Awards at American Astronomical Society Meeting
March 16, 2023

Junior Jupiter Ding was awarded the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Award for his work presented at this winter’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.  His work was titled “Miscentering of Optical Galaxy Clusters Based on Sunyaev-Zeldovich Counterparts” and his research was with Michael Strauss and Roohi Dalal. …

Scott Tremaine Publishes Book “Dynamics of Planetary Systems”
Feb. 17, 2023

A new book by Scott Tremaine, Emeritus Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation and renowned dynamicist, was published by Princeton University Press last week.  Tremaine’s book, “Dynamics of Planetary Systems,” focuses on celestial mechanics—the study of the movement of planets, satellites, and smaller bodies…

Cosmologist Alexandra Amon to join the faculty
Feb. 15, 2023

Dr. Alexandra Amon will join the faculty in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University this Fall.  Dr. Amon is a world-leading cosmologist, who uses large-scale surveys of galaxies to study the structure of the universe.  In particular, the clustering of galaxies, and the subtle distortion of their shapes due to…

Department Equity Prizes Awarded
Feb. 8, 2023

On Friday, February 3rd, at the Annual Climate Committee Town Hall, three department members were honored with Equity Prizes for their work within and outside of the department.  This year's awardees are Rodrigo Córdova, Graduate Student, Class of 2025, Roohi Dalal, Graduate Student, Class of 2024, and Polly Strauss, Academic Program…

FACULTY AWARD: McComas is Awarded Arctowski Medal by the National Academy of Sciences
Jan. 25, 2023

David McComas, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and Vice President for the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, has been announced as the recipient of the 2023 Arctowski Medal awarded by the National Academy of Sciences.  The award recognizes McComas’s seminal contributions to space physics, with leadership in mission and instrument…

Breakthrough confirmation of key theory behind the formation of planets, stars and supermassive black holes
Jan. 19, 2023

A device that was originally conceived by Hantao Ji and Jeremy Goodman, faculty members in Astrophysical Sciences, in the early 2000s, was used to confirm a theory of how mass is driven inward in so-called accretion disks to form planets, stars, and supermassive black holes.  Since the early 1990’s it has been hypothesized that in the…

FACULTY AWARD: Spitkovsky Wins Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society
Jan. 13, 2023

Anatoly Spitkovsky, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, was recently awarded the 2023 Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society, High Energy Astrophysics Division.  The prize, named for Bruno Rossi, Italian experimental physicist, is awarded "for a significant contribution to High Energy Astrophysics, with particular…

Postdoctoral Fellow Ashley Chontos and Team Discover Possible Tidal Demise of Planet
Dec. 22, 2022

Henry Norris Russell Postdoctoral Fellow, Ashley Chontos and an international team, have detected a planet that is nearing the end of its lifetime, one that is likely to end tragically by being engulfed by its host star.  The planet, Kepler-1658b, was discovered by Chontos in 2019 when she was a graduate student at University of…