I find the world with its inequities and injustices to be messy, unfair, and complicated. The cosmos, on the other hand, is orderly and beautiful - this I find terribly alluring and captivating.
I fell in love with the night sky when I first looked through a telescope as a young girl growing up in Delhi.
Everyone acknowledges that there is a political part to tenure, but no one likes to admit it.
The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.
Dark matter is one of the dominant constituents of the universe, which piled up in certain parts of the universe due to gravity, and in those regions, galaxies were formed. It is the unseen thing that holds the universe together.
As an astrophysicist, my research work involves mapping dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for about a quarter of our universe.
Mapping, both literal and metaphorical, has always been about our quest for knowing.
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.
As Congress battles over spending and cost cutting, it is imperative that funding for math education programs does not fall victim.
Research in basic sciences now requires resources that no one country can provide.
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.
Finding the first seed black holes could help reveal how the relation between black holes and their host galaxies evolved over time.
Mental discipline and tenacity in the face of obstacles are traits that have greatly helped me in both my personal and professional journey thus far. I am also very optimistic by nature and tend to focus on the positive and remain hopeful when faced with adversity.
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.
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.
My students may have dexterity with the equations they're required to know, but they lack the capacity to apply their knowledge to real-life problems. This critical shortcoming appears in high school and possibly in elementary grades - long before college.
Growing up in Delhi, India, I did puzzles, explored numbers, and searched for patterns in everyday settings long before I ever saw an equation.
Perhaps more than English or history, STEM subjects require an enormous amount of foundational learning before students can become competent.
We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.
If you know the shape of the lens and the image you get, you can work out the path that light followed between the object and your eye.
