On Friday, November 11th, the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Tokyo University) announced that the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), which will be the most powerful multi-object spectrograph in the world, passed a milestone, capturing light from several hundred…
Eliot Quataert and collaborators have used the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to discover a star like the Sun orbiting around a black hole with a mass of about 10 times the mass of the Sun. The black hole was found by carefully measuring the change on the sky in the location of the star as it orbits around the black hole, and was…
David Spergel, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, Emeritus Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy, past Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, and president of the Simons Foundation, has been selected by NASA to chair an independent sixteen-member study team researching unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)…
Eve Ostriker, Associate Chair and Lyman Spitzer, Jr., Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, has been selected to become an American Physical Society Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS). Ostriker was elected by the Council of Representatives for this honor with the citation “For seminal contributions to our understanding of the…
Amitava Bhattacharjee, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) received the American Physical Society (APS), 2022 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics. The award citation reads, "for seminal theoretical investigations of a wide range of fundamental plasma processes,…
The cover story of the September 2022 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly describes the James Webb Space Telescope and its connections to the Princeton astrophysics community. The article quotes many department members past and present.
Tea Temim, a research astronomer who joined Princeton last year…
Neta A. Bahcall, Eugene Higgins Professor of Astrophysics and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Astrophysics and Andrés Plazas Malagón, Associate Research Scholar, along with an international team, recently published a study which measured the distribution of dark matter around galaxies to redshifts of 4, corresponding to a time a mere 1…
Mami Akiyama, a staff member who joined the department in 2015 was recently featured in the “Year of the Tiger” series, created to share the stories of Princeton’s vibrant Asian and Asian American community. In her interview, Mami discusses her childhood as a Japanese immigrant living in New York City, her experience in a diverse, Arts…
In June, David Spergel, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and Emeritus Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, along with 36 others, including two other Princeton faculty. Election to the APS honors extraordinary accomplishments in…
Princetonians Neta Bahcall, Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, and Director of Undergraduate Studies; Gillian Knapp, Emerita Professor of Astrophysical Sciences; and Hiranya Peiris *03, Professor of Astrophysics at the University…