Tag «Carnegie Institution for Science»

Sagan Award Goes to Committee Chaired by Carnegie’s Alan Dressler

  Pasadena, CA—Over 20 years ago, Carnegie astronomer emeritus Alan Dressler chaired the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Beyond Committee. It has been awarded the 2017 Carl Sagan Memorial Award presented at the meeting of the American Astronautical Society March 7-9 in Greenbelt, Maryland. In the mid-1990s, …

Melting temperature of Earth’s mantle depends on water

Washington, DC—A joint study between Carnegie and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has determined that the average temperature of Earth’s mantle beneath ocean basins is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit (60 Celsius) higher than previously thought, due to water present in deep minerals. The results are published in Science.   Earth’s mantle, the layer just beneath …

Hunting for giant planet analogs in our own backyard

  Washington, DC—There may be a large number of undetected bright, substellar objects similar to giant exoplanets in our own solar neighborhood, according to new work from a team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal. It is published by The Astrophysical …

Team makes planet hunting a group effort, finds more than 100 candidates

  Washington, DC— An international team of astronomers released the largest-ever compilation of exoplanet-detecting observations made using a technique called the radial velocity method. They demonstrated how these observations can be used to hunt for planets by detecting more than 100 potential exoplanets, including one orbiting the fourth-closest star to our own Solar System, which …

How fast will we need to adapt to climate change?

Stanford, CA— What would we do differently if sea level were to rise one foot per century versus one foot per decade? Until now, most policy and research has focused on adapting to specific amounts of climate change and not on how fast that climate change might happen. Using sea-level rise as a case study, …

Reconciling dwarf galaxies with dark matter

Pasadena, CA— Dwarf galaxies are enigmas wrapped in riddles. Although they are the smallest galaxies, they represent some of the biggest mysteries about our universe. While many dwarf galaxies surround our own Milky Way, there seem to be far too few of them compared with standard cosmological models, which raises a lot of questions about …

The rise and fall of galaxy formation

Pasadena, CA—An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90 percent of cosmic history. Their work, which includes some of the most sensitive astronomical measurements made to date, is published by The Astrophysical Journal. The FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) has built a multicolored photo …

Hunt for ninth planet reveals new extremely distant Solar System objects

Washington, DC— In the race to discover a proposed ninth planet in our Solar System, Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of Northern Arizona University have observed several never-before-seen objects at extreme distances from the Sun in our Solar System. Sheppard and Trujillo have now submitted their latest discoveries to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor …