In a new book published this month, MIT astronomer Anna Frebel chronicles her work as a stellar archaeologist, scanning the skies with telescopes and spectroscopes to study ancient stars and their chemical composition. Frebel and her colleagues have identified some of the oldest known stars, which help researchers learn about what the universe looked like in its first billion years.

“Why is that interesting? Because stars in general make all the chemical elements we know from the periodic table, inside their cores,” said Frebel in an interview with MIT News. “So everything we know and love, all the matter we’re made of today, had to be cooked up in stars and supernova explosions for billions of years.”

In her book Frebel highlights contributions to astronomy made by women, including the “Harvard Computers,” dozens of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who catalogued stars, classified spectra, and did their own research in the Harvard College Observatory. “My work kind of goes back to many of the things they did,” said Frebel. “And I find it really important to remember what has been done before, and what the contributions of women were in science. In my book, it comes through here and there, that I’m just one of those sisters, and that we keep doing what we’re doing, and so will many others after me, I’m sure.”

Explore Professor Frebel’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009, they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series that links news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Ed Boyden – PopTech 2015. Photo by PopTech. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike.

Three MIT researchers were honored this week in a star-studded, televised ceremony for the Breakthrough Prizes, which go to “important, primarily recent, achievements” in fundamental physics, life sciences, and math. The 2016 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, worth $3 million each, went to five scientists including Edward Boyden, associate professor of media arts and sciences, biological engineering, and brain and cognitive sciences. Boyden received the award for his work developing optogenetics.

Mathematician Larry Guth and physicist Liang Fu each won a New Horizons prize, worth $100,000. Guth (whose father Alan won a Breakthrough Prize in 2012, the inaugural year) was honored for his “ingenious and surprising solutions to long standing open problems in symplectic geometry, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and combinatorial geometry.” Fu and two other physicists won for their “outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics, especially involving the use of topology to understand new states of matter.”

The prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. This year’s ceremony, which aired on the National Geographic Channel (and will rerun on Fox later this month), was hosted by Seth McFarlane and featured appearances by Pharrell Williams, Russell Crowe, and Hilary Swank, among others.

Explore Professor Boyden’s research, Professor Guth’s research, and Professor Fu’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.