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. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…