Priyamvada Natarajan – författare

A noted astrophysicist presents a lively and accessible introduction to radical ideas and discoveries that are transforming our knowledge of the universe“A strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but of the way we have tried to understand it, from the Babylonians to black holes and dark matter.”—Richard Holmes, “By the Book,”New York Times Book Review“Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011This book provides a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance.The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe.

This book contains up-to-date review articles on all important aspects of strong gravitational lensing, written by the top experts in the field. The chapters cover themes like the search for strong lenses, lensing as a probe for dark matter, lensing and microlensing of supernovae, to name just a few. The topical reviews are framed by two complementary introductory articles on “Essentials” and “Basic Elements”, respectively, of strong gravitational lensing.This book is aimed both at front-line researchers and at newcomers and students, offering a comprehensive treatment that bridges fundamental concepts with the latest advances in gravitational lensingReprinted from the journal Space Science Reviews, Topical Collection: Strong Gravitational Lensing, 2025