Research Highlights

Much of our understanding of cosmology is anchored in observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in our Universe. An ongoing major upgrade to the Simons Observatory will soon allow us to survey the sky faster and more sensitively, allowing us to pierce deeper into the static CMB while simultaneously capturing the transient events that make up our dynamic Universe.

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun. How SMBHs work is one of the key questions in astrophysics because they test the behavior of matter in strong gravitational fields, and their growth is strongly connected to how galaxies themselves evolve. Their X-ray emission can unveil the structure of the SMBH system.

Right now, a few relativistic particles are passing through your head every second at the speed of light. They have more than ten million times more energy than our best particle accelerator can achieve, and scientists still don’t know how nature does that!

This century, astronomy will push beyond the confines of light and begin to detect new signals such as neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves in multi-messenger astronomy

In the last post, we talked about astronomers pushing frontiers of knowledge. Gravitational waves represent perhaps the most peculiar frontier beyond light.

Several KIPAC members are running an experiment (LUX-ZEPLIN) almost a mile underground in South Dakota, looking for evidence of the invisible: dark matter!

The Universe has an invisible skeleton made of particles we can’t describe in our current theories, known only as dark matter.

X-ray astronomy unlocks a hidden universe of extreme events: from black holes and exploding stars to heated gas in galaxy clusters.

The Simons Observatory, a cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment which will soon begin to map this ancient light with exquisite precision

The cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang, has been a treasure trove of information about the cosmos since its discovery in the 1960s.