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Master To Head Astronomy Society

“It’s not that there’s some burning issue that we stood on different sides of,” he said. “She would have been a good president, too.”

As a faculty member of the CFA and professor of Science A-35, “Matter and the Universe,” Kirshner is currently researching an entity called “dark matter,” which he believes acts directly against gravity and is causing expansion of the universe to accelerate.

This dark matter cannot be described in terms of our modern understanding of the fundamental components of matter—like protons, neutrons and electrons—and instead is composed of substances indescribable and previously unobserved, he said.

Kirshner further describes dark matter in his new book, The Extravagant Universe. He is also the author of more than 200 research papers on supernovas, large-scale distribution of galaxies and the size and shape of the universe.

—Staff Writer Nura A. Hossainzadeh can be reached at hossainz@fas.harvard.edud.edu.

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