The one thing everyone knows about black holes is that absolutely everything nearby gets sucked into them.

Almost everything, it turns out.

“Even though black holes are defined as objects from which nothing can escape, one of the astonishing predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity is that black holes can actually…

In March of 2022, a student in Ukraine sent an email to the Princeton University physics department. The 18-year-old, Oleksandr Shelestiuk, soon received a response from Chris Tully, Princeton professor of physics and researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear…

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $52.66 million grant to fund a major infrastructure upgrade to the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Upgrades are expected to take about five years; the resulting facility will be known as the Advanced Simons Observatory (ASO).

ASO’s principal investigator is Mark Devlin of…

For millennia, humans have been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos.

Unlike ancient philosophers imagining the universe’s origins, modern cosmologists use quantitative tools to gain insights into its evolution and structure. Modern cosmology dates back to the early 20th century, with the development of Albert Einstein’s theory of…

In late 2021, Salvatore Torquato, on sabbatical from the Department of Chemistry, reached across the aisle as it were and invited a young astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study to apply the tools of statistical mechanics to his own work on the distribution of galaxies…

At the northern and southern tips of our planet are tiny bubbles of air trapped for millions of years within polar ice. These microscopic time capsules hold a record of Earth’s atmosphere — and thus its climate history.

“Ice is time, crystalized,” said Princeton environmentalist Anne McClintock. “Ice is the custodian of deep time,…