The cosmological constant, Einstein's biggest mistake

Françoise Combes is an astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, holder of the "Galaxies and Cosmology" chair at the Collège de France, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. She is interested in the formation and evolution of galaxies, including primordial galaxies and the cosmic history of star formation. She studies the symbiotic evolution of galaxies and super-massive black holes. She has proposed new models for the dark matter of the universe, and is attempting to constrain them with numerical simulations of galaxy dynamics. She has served on numerous boards and committees, notably to distribute time on major instruments, from the Hubble Space Telescope to the ALMA interferometer in Chile. She has served as President of the French Astronomy and Astrophysics Society, and President of the Galaxies and Cosmology Division of the International Astrophysical Union. Françoise Combes has published several books on galaxies, dark matter and the Milky Way.