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This lecture was presented by award-winning author and Yale professor Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan at Cahn Auditorium on October 24, 2019. Natarajan discussed how mapping over time encodes radical new scientific ideas. She walked through the history of the acceptance of new astronomical ideas, and talked about the status of several current transformative (and deeply contested)

An international team of astronomers, including Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, has discovered one of the largest structures ever observed in the Milky Way. A newly spotted pair of radio-emitting bubbles reach hundreds of light-years tall, dwarfing all other structures in the central region of the galaxy.

The length of a human life barely registers on the scale of cosmic time. In spite of our relatively tiny size and our limited time here on Earth, a single generation of humans can take giant leaps forward in our understanding of the Universe. Join us to find out how dramatically our story of the

Northwestern Physics and Astronomy student Alex Gurvich presents a talk as part of the Northwestern Ready Set Go (RSG) program. The goals of the program are to increase awareness for the urgent need for excellent research communicators and to coach graduate and post doctoral researchers to improve their own presentation skills. The program focuses on three important

Northwestern Physics and Astronomy student Zachary Hafen presents a talk as part of the Northwestern Ready Set Go (RSG) program. The goals of the program are to increase awareness for the urgent need for excellent research communicators and to coach graduate and post doctoral researchers to improve their own presentation skills. The program focuses on three important

Simulation of an isolated disc galaxy, looking at the disc of the galaxy face on (top panels) and edge on (bottom panels). The left-hand panels show images of the stellar light, and is what we would see if we viewed this galaxy with a telescope such as Hubble. The right-hand panels show the gas in

Firefly is a portable web-based 3d visualization software developed in partnership between the Northwestern University Galaxy Formation and Visualization groups. It was developed with the data output of the FIRE simulations in mind but can visualize any 3d dataset (in coordinate or phase space). In this video I demonstrate some of the key features of

In this movie, the color of each pixel represents the temperature of the gas (blue for cold and green for hot) and the brightness of each pixel represents the density (dim for low density bright for high density). Thus diffuse and hot gas looks like a hazy green mist while cold and dense gas looks