News archive

171 items by year. Latest news & search

2026 3

2025 17

2024 13

2023 17

2022 21

2021 51

2020 24

Nov 9 Q&A with the Penn State LIGO Group
Oct 1 Shifu Zhu, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, had his research discoveries on radio-loud quasars featured in a 2020 October press release by the Chandra X-ray Center.
Oct 1 Roger Penrose was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Oct 1 Celebrating Sir Roger’s Nobel Prize in Physics
Sep 1 On May 21, 2019 the Advanced LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston in the USA and the Virgo detector in Italy, observed a gravitational wave signal from the heaviest merger of black holes, yet observed.
Sep 1 Nature published a special collection of articles on Multi-Messenger Astrophysics.
Aug 1 When A Supernova Fails...
Jul 1 Abhay Ashtekar, Brajesh Gupt, Donghui Jeong and V. Sreenath published an article `Alleviating the tension in the cosmic microwave background using Planck scale physics'
Jul 1 IGC celebrated its silver jubilee through an international conference igc@25
Jun 23 In an invited comment, Miguel Mostafa describes the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON)
Jun 19 Garrett Wendel, Luis Martínez, and Martin Bojowald discuss the fundamental nature of time in our universe.
Jun 10 Raising awareness of racism in STEM
Jun 1 LIGO-Virgo finds mystery object in mass gap
Jun 1 Cambridge University Press has released a paperback edition of `General Relativity and Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective'.
Jun 1 The Story of Loop Quantum Gravity
Jun 1 Popular article by Peter Mészáros on High Energy Neutrinos
May 14 Physics graduate student Rachael Huxford coordinates hundreds of local mask makers
May 2 LIGO detects another probable Neutron Star collision
May 1 The Future of Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Jan 6 Penn State's Bianchi, Gupta and Sathyaprakash were coauthors of a paper that was awarded second prize of the annual Buchalter Cosmology prize announced at the AAS meeting in Hawaii in early January.
Jan 1 Eberly College of Science 2020 Frontiers of Science Lecture Series entitled `Predicting the Future Improving Lives and Communities through Modeling'
Jan 1 Galactic gamma-ray sources revel birthplaces of high-energy particles (Mostafa)
Jan 1 Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor and member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, will offer a poetry reading on Thursday, January 30 at 7:30 PM in the Paterno Library's Foster Auditorium.
Jan 1 IGC’s Rachael Huxford was co-author of one of the most-read publications in The Physics Teacher of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

2019 9

2018 3

2017 5

2016 8

Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.