Latest News

Dr. Kai Wang awarded best oral presentation at the 25th Guoshoujing Symposium

Mon, 2023-05-29Dr. Kai Wang and five other presenters from other institutes were selected for best oral presentations at the 25th Chinese Astronomical Society Guoshoujing Symposium on Galaxies and Cosmology.  

Mini Workshop on Compact Objects and Gravitational Waves held at KIAA

Sun, 2023-05-07A one-day workshop on the topic of compact objects and gravitational waves was recently held on 2023 April 19. Over 30 undergraduates, PhDs, postdocs and faculty members participated in the event, with a special guest, Prof. Ian Jones, visiting from the University of Southampton,UK.

Luis C. Ho Elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Thu, 2023-04-20Luis C. Ho, Director of KIAA and Chair Professor of Peking University, has been elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).

2023 Postdoc Science Day

Fri, 2023-03-24The postdoc science day was held on Wednesday, Mar. 22. This annual event provides an opportunity for postdocs to communicate their research interests, recent advances, and future plans, while also promoting discussions and potential collaborations among postdocs in different research fields.

KIAA welcomes Dr. Fangzhou Jiang (姜方周) as a new faculty member

Mon, 2023-02-20Dr. Jiang obtained his PhD from Yale University in 2016. He was a Troesh Scholar at California Institute of Technology and a Joint Theory Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories from 2020 to 2023, and an Israeli Planning-and-Budget-Committee Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2016 to 2019.

PhD Student Zhuokai Liu wins Kavli Institute Images Contest

Mon, 2023-01-09Peking University PhD student Zhuokai Liu won the inaugural Vision of Science contest, awarded by the Kavli Foundation to five images from researchers at the 20 Kavli Institutes.

Black hole-neutron star mergers as the origin of GRB 211211-like long-duration gamma-ray bursts

Tue, 2022-12-13Recently, Peking University PhD student Jinping Zhu, advised by Prof. Zhuo Li, showed that a peculiar class of long-lasting gamma-ray bursts, like GRB 211211, which lack bright supernova counterparts but are associated with candidate kilonova, can indeed originate from black hole-neutron star mergers. Most long-duration gamma-ray bursts (duration longer than about 2 seconds) are typically thought to be derived from core collapses of massive stars, which produce also bright supernovae.

Lijing Shao awarded as an Alibaba DAMO Academy Young Fellow

Mon, 2022-10-31This fellowship is awarded to Prof. Shao for his contributions in proposing new tests of gravity theories, leading to significant advances in our understanding of the fundamental physical laws.

Dr. Rui Xu won the Galaxies 2022 Best Paper Award

Thu, 2022-09-22Using a simple gravity model that breaks Lorentz symmetry in the Standard-Model Extension framework, Rui Xu, Yong Gao, and Lijing Shao from KIAA, found an imprint that deviates from the prediction of general relativity (GR) in the continuous GWs from freely precessing, rapidly rotating neutron stars.

FAST Reveals a Dynamically Evolving Environment Around a Repeating Fast Radio Burst Source

Thu, 2022-09-22In a Nature paper published on 21 September 2022, the FAST FRB team reported using FAST to monitor FRB 20201124A for about 2 months. They analyzed 1,863 bursts of FRB 20201124A detected by FAST in totally 84-hour observations obtained across 54 days, which is the largest sample of bursts recorded with polarization information so far. The high event rate makes FRB 20201124A among the most active known FRBs. They discovered several phenomena never detected before, the irregular short-time variation of the Faraday rotation measure, which probes the line-of-sight magnetic field strength, of individual bursts during the first 36 days, followed by a constant value; they witnessed the quenching of the burst activity on a timescale shorter than three days; they detected prominent circular polarization in these bursts (up to 75%); they detected ooscillations in fractional linear and circular polarizations as well as polarization angle as a function of wavelength.