Black holes are enigmatic astronomical objects, areas where the gravity is so immense that it has warped spacetime so that not even light can escape.
My own day-to-day observations confirm that many Americans can barely make change. At the supermarket where I buy groceries, I've watched more than one encounter at the cash register where both customer and clerk are befuddled at the prospect of double-checking the sums.
Data suggest that central black holes might play an important role in adjusting how many stars form in the galaxies they inhabit. For one thing, the energy produced when matter falls into the black hole may heat up the surrounding gas at the center of the galaxy, thus preventing cooling and halting star formation.
The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.
As Congress battles over spending and cost cutting, it is imperative that funding for math education programs does not fall victim.
We cannot decide on the efficacy of a medical treatment by counting the number of 'Likes' an intervention receives on Facebook; no matter what, professionals will still need to conduct continued clinical trials and evaluate their outcomes carefully.
I am obsessed with trying to understand why there is such rampant denialism of science in our country. I find this exuberant irrationalism extremely disturbing. And this is particularly troubling, because I am a professional scientist.
We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.
We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.
The deep fascination with the mysterious, and the impulse to seek and locate ourselves in the cosmic context, seems to be imprinted in our DNA and psyches.
The pace and demands in any field, be it genetics, nanotechnology or cosmology, can only be met with increased international cooperation and collaborative projects.
I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.
We knew from theoretical models that mergers of massive, gas-rich galaxies were more frequent in the past. Now we've found that these mergers are responsible for producing both the nearby obscured quasar population and their distant cousins.
Science is evidence-based and provides a continuing understanding of complex natural phenomena. Our understanding is constantly evolving and continually improving.
The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.
Scientific knowledge is, by its nature, provisional. This is due to the fact that as time goes on, with the invention of better instruments, more data and better data hone our understanding further. Social, cultural, economic, and political context are relevant to our understanding of how science works.
Evidence-based reasoning underpins all scientific thinking, and it involves testing hypotheses or theories against data. Validating a theory requires replicable measurements from independent groups with different equipment and methods of analysis. Convergence of evidence is critical to the acceptance of a scientific idea.
