Research
Neta A. Bahcall is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University and past Director of the Council on Science and Technology. She is the Director of the Undergraduate Program in Astrophysics there and her research interests are:
Quasars and Their Environment; Supermassive Black-Holes
Clusters of Galaxies; Formation and Evolution of Structure
Large-Scale Structure of the Universe
Tracing Cosmic Distribution of Dark Matter, Baryons, Stars, & Light
Dark Matter and the Mass Density of the Universe; Dark Energy
Observational Cosmology
Bahcall is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, past Vice-President and Councilor of the American Astronomical Society, Century Lecturer of the AAS, and Chair and member of various NASA, NSF, and Congressional committees.
She combines observational data from large-scale surveys (such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and other observations to determine the structure in the universe and its properties. She then compares it with those expected from cosmological simulations.
Bahcall has made many contributions to the field of astrophsysics and cosmology, producing and contributing to over 300 publications since 1966. Both she and her husband, John Bahcall, have shaped the way astrophysicists understand and study the universe. More information can be found on her Princeton website.
Answering the Questions of the Universe
Bahcall, like many astrophysicists and cosmologists over the last couple decades, has been focusing on big picture questions about dark matter such as:
How much dark matter exists in the universe?
Is the mass density of the universe enough to stop the expansion of the universe?
How much is the mass density of the universe?
How is the whole universe expanding and what will happen in the future? How is dark matter distributed? Where is it mostly located?
Neta and her husband, John, (Tel Aviv, 1972) working on the discovery of HZ Herc at the Wise Observatory
"Understanding the nature and properties of these dark sector components comprise the most fundamental open questions in cosmology and physics today."
- Neta Bahcall, PNAS Dark Matter Universe, 2015
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