Ryan Cooke and Max Pettini receive $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize for Measuring a Key Value at the Dawn of the Universe
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 28-Jun-2025 13:10 ET (28-Jun-2025 17:10 GMT/UTC)
New Haven, Conn. — The 2025 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize recognizes Ryan Cooke and Max Pettini both for their determination of a key value in the composition of the universe moments after it came into existence and for perfecting the method that allowed them to make that measurement.
Cooke and Pettini will equally share the $500,000 award and each will receive a gold laureate pin at a ceremony that will take place later this year. The citation honors them for “bringing the light element abundances and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) into the realm of precision cosmology.”
New Haven, Conn. — Apples-to-apples comparisons in the distant universe are hard to come by.
Whether the subject is dwarf galaxies, supermassive black holes, or “hot Jupiters,” astronomers can spend months or years searching for comparable objects and formations to study. And it is rarer still when those objects are side-by-side.
But a new Yale study offers a road map for finding “twin” planetary systems — showing whether binary stars that orbit each other, and that were born at the same time and place, tend to host similar orbiting planets. The study’s authors found that certain orientations of twin star systems may provide critical information about planet formation, while also being easier for astronomers to discover planets within the systems.
Researchers at Incheon National University explored how domestic public opinion influences foreign policy alignment decisions among U.S. allies during great power competition. Using a survey experiment centered on South Korea’s potential Quad membership, they found that leaders face audience costs when reversing alignment commitments, particularly from pro-U.S. constituents. The study highlights how shifting public preferences can strengthen or weaken alignment credibility in international politics.
The gigantic-oxidative atomic-layer-by-layer epitaxy (GOALL-Epitaxy) method substantially augments the oxidation power by orders of magnitude, enabling atomically precise construction of artificially designed metastable complex oxide structures.
Astronomers have developed a groundbreaking computer simulation to explore, in unprecedented detail, magnetism and turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) — the vast ocean of gas and charged particles that lies between stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Described in a new study published today in Nature Astronomy, the model is the most powerful to date, requiring the computing capability of the SuperMUC-NG supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It directly challenges our understanding of how magnetized turbulence operates in astrophysical environments.
Researchers report on ionospheric sporadic E layer (Es) activity during the Mother’s Day geomagnetic storm. The team found that the Es layers were significantly enhanced over Southeast Asia, Australia and South Pacific, as well as the eastern Pacific regions during the recovery phase of the geomagnetic storm. They also observed a propagation characteristic in the Es enhancement region wherein the clouds were first detected in high latitudes and detected successively in lower latitudes as time progressed.