Priyamvada Natarajan is a leader in the effort to map the universe’s invisible contents, which is to say, almost everything. Ninety-five percent of all stuff takes mysterious, nonluminous forms dubbed dark matter and dark energy, which betray their presence in the cosmos by attracting and repulsing, respectively, the 5 percent of stuff that’s visible. Even that 5 percent is increasingly slipping out of sight, as stars and gas tumble into gargantuan black holes at the centers of galaxies.
Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor at Yale University, creates maps of where dark matter is clumped and how dark energy stretches space. She also models the growth of those supermassive black holes and helped develop the leading theory of their formation in the early universe—a theory that will be tested by telescope observations in the near future.