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Priya Natarajan | |
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Born | 1969 (age 54–55) [1] Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India |
Alma mater | MIT, University of Cambridge, Trinity College, Institute of Astronomy |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cosmology, theoretical astrophysics |
Institutions | Yale University (professor) |
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. [2] She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly in gravitational lensing and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. [3] She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos. [4] She has been featured on shows such as Black Hole Apocalypse on PBS, showcasing her work and background. [5]
Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents. [6] She grew up in New Delhi, where she would visit Nehru Planetarium Delhi and had a great interest in celestial and terrestrial maps as a kid. [5]
Natarajan has undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from M.I.T (1986-1991). [7] She was awarded a Master of Science from the Program in Science, Technology & Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1991-1994). [7] She did her graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, England, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 1998. [2] There she was a member of Trinity College and was elected to a Title A Research Fellowship that she held from 1997 to 2003. [7] Prior to coming to Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada. [7]
Natarajan has done extensive work in the following fields:
Natarajan was awarded the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 2008. [7] In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [7] Natarajan was also the 2009 recipient of the award for academic achievement from the Global Organization for the People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). [7] In 2010, she was the recipient of the India Abroad Foundation's "Face of the Future" Award. [7] Natarajan was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2008, the Explorers Club in 2010, and the American Physical Society in 2011. [7] She was awarded a JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) Fellowship in 2010 at University of Boulder. [7] In 2011 she was awarded an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in New Delhi, India. [7] She was the Caroline Herschel Distinguished Visitor at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore for 2011–2012. [7] In addition to her current appointments at Yale and Harvard, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship, Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and was recently elected to an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi. [9]
She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. [10] She was named a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2024, for "seminal contributions to our understanding of the nature of dark matter and black hole physics, and for the development of a brand-new framework that enables mapping the detailed distribution of dark matter on small scales within galaxy clusters using gravitational lensing". [11]
Natarajan was named by Time as one of its hundred most influential people in 2024. [12]
Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.
In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be observed. Such effects occur in the context of formation and evolution of galaxies, gravitational lensing, the observable universe's current structure, mass position in galactic collisions, the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies.
The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies. Galaxy formation is hypothesized to occur from structure formation theories, as a result of tiny quantum fluctuations in the aftermath of the Big Bang. The simplest model in general agreement with observed phenomena is the Lambda-CDM model—that is, clustering and merging allows galaxies to accumulate mass, determining both their shape and structure. Hydrodynamics simulation, which simulates both baryons and dark matter, is widely used to study galaxy formation and evolution.
A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by accretion onto a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses, surrounded by a gaseous accretion disc. Gas in the disc falling towards the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The radiant energy of quasars is enormous; the most powerful quasars have luminosities thousands of times greater than that of a galaxy such as the Milky Way. Quasars are usually categorized as a subclass of the more general category of AGN. The redshifts of quasars are of cosmological origin.
Extragalactic astronomy is the branch of astronomy concerned with objects outside the Milky Way galaxy. In other words, it is the study of all astronomical objects which are not covered by galactic astronomy.
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M☉). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.
Plasma cosmology is a non-standard cosmology whose central postulate is that the dynamics of ionized gases and plasmas play important, if not dominant, roles in the physics of the universe at interstellar and intergalactic scales. In contrast, the current observations and models of cosmologists and astrophysicists explain the formation, development, and evolution of large-scale structures as dominated by gravity.
In physical cosmology, a protogalaxy, which could also be called a "primeval galaxy", is a cloud of gas which is forming into a galaxy. It is believed that the rate of star formation during this period of galactic evolution will determine whether a galaxy is a spiral or elliptical galaxy; a slower star formation tends to produce a spiral galaxy. The smaller clumps of gas in a protogalaxy form into stars.
A galactic halo is an extended, roughly spherical component of a galaxy which extends beyond the main, visible component. Several distinct components of a galaxy comprise its halo:
The Lambda-CDM, Lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM model is a mathematical model of the Big Bang theory with three major components:
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to astronomy:
Simon David Manton White, FRS, is a British-German astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019.
While the presence of any mass bends the path of light passing near it, this effect rarely produces the giant arcs and multiple images associated with strong gravitational lensing. Most lines of sight in the universe are thoroughly in the weak lensing regime, in which the deflection is impossible to detect in a single background source. However, even in these cases, the presence of the foreground mass can be detected, by way of a systematic alignment of background sources around the lensing mass. Weak gravitational lensing is thus an intrinsically statistical measurement, but it provides a way to measure the masses of astronomical objects without requiring assumptions about their composition or dynamical state.
In cosmology, primordial black holes (PBHs) are hypothetical black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the inflationary era and early radiation-dominated universe, extremely dense pockets of subatomic matter may have been tightly packed to the point of gravitational collapse, creating primordial black holes without the supernova compression typically needed to make black holes today. Because the creation of primordial black holes would pre-date the first stars, they are not limited to the narrow mass range of stellar black holes.
The George Darwin Lectureship is an award granted by the Royal Astronomical Society to a 'distinguished and eloquent speaker' on the subject of Astronomy including astrochemistry, astrobiology and astroparticle physics. The award is named after the astronomer George Darwin and has been given annually since 1984. The speaker may be based in the UK or overseas.
Georges Meylan is a Swiss astronomer, born on July 31, 1950, in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was the director of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and now a professor emeritus of astrophysics and cosmology at EPFL. He is still active in both research and teaching.
The Mészáros effect "is the main physical process that alters the shape of the initial power spectrum of fluctuations in the cold dark matter theory of cosmological structure formation". It was introduced in 1974 by Péter Mészáros considering the behavior of dark matter perturbations in the range around the radiation-matter equilibrium redshift and up to the radiation decoupling redshift . This showed that, for a non-baryonic cold dark matter not coupled to radiation, the small initial perturbations expected to give rise to the present day large scale structures experience below an additional distinct growth period which alters the initial fluctuation power spectrum, and allows sufficient time for the fluctuations to grow into galaxies and galaxy clusters by the present epoch. This involved introducing and solving a joint radiation plus dark matter perturbation equation for the density fluctuations ,
Fabio Pacucci is an Italian theoretical astrophysicist and science educator, currently at Harvard University and at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He is widely known for his contributions to the study of black holes, in particular the first population of black holes formed in the Universe and high redshift quasars. He discovered the only two candidate direct collapse black holes known so far, and he was in the team that discovered the farthest lensed quasar known. Pacucci is also a science educator, engaged in public talks on astronomy and science in general. Since 2018 he is a collaborator of TED in developing educational videos about science. The four videos released so far were watched by millions of people worldwide and translated into 25 languages.
Jenny Wagner is a German physicist, cosmologist, and book author.