Young, unattached Jupiter analog found in solar neighborhood
Washington, DC—A team of astronomers from Carnegie and Western University in Ontario, Canada, has discovered one of the youngest and brightest free-floating, planet-like objects within...
Mercury's Mysterious "Darkness" Revealed
Washington, D.C.—Scientists have long been puzzled about what makes Mercury's surface so dark. The innermost planet reflects much less sunlight than the Moon, a body on which surface...
Portion of ancient Australian chert microstructures definitively pseudo-fossils
Washington, DC— A team of scientists including Carnegie's Dina Bower and Andrew Steele weigh in on whether microstructures found in 3.46 billion-year-old samples of a silica-rich rock...
Way beyond diamonds: Bob Hazen tells the L.A. Times about some of the rarest minerals in the world
"What is most astonishing about rare minerals is that the processes that ultimately forms most of them comes from biology," Bob Hazen tells the Los Angeles Times. "As life changes...
New Scientist: Earth's rarest minerals could hint at life on other planets
The world's 2500 rarest minerals have now been categorised for the first time, revealing intriguing implications. Most have been formed in processes directly or indirectly related to living...
Consistency of Earth's magnetic field history surprises scientists
Washington, D.C.—Earth's magnetic field is generated by the motion of liquid iron in the planet's core. This "geodynamo" occasionally reverses its polarity—the...
Marathoning astronomer Jackie Faherty offers tips to see five planets on your morning run.
Jackie Faherty talks to Runner's World about spotting Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter during a single early morning run....
Jackie Faherty talks to NPR about planetary alignment
Through late February, five planets will align in early morning sky, and can be seen unaided. Jackie Faherty tells NPR it is like the planetary Academy Awards....
Carnegie's Paul Butler has been leading work on a multiyear project to carry out the first reconnaissance of all 2,000 nearby Sun-like stars within 150 light-years of the solar system (1 lightyear is about 9.4 trillion kilometers). His team is currently monitoring about 1,700 stars, including 1...
Diana Roman
Volcanologist Diana Roman is interested in the mechanics of how magma moves through the Earth's crust, and in the structure, evolution, and dynamics of volcanic conduit systems. Her ultimate goal is to understand the likelihood and timing of volcanic eruptions. Most of Roman's research...
Mars rover finds ancient organic compounds that match meteoritic samples
NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered new "tough" organic molecules in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks on Mars, increasing the chances that the record of habitability and...
Carnegie's Andrew Steele part of $9 million NASA astrobiology grant-winning team
Carnegie's Andrew Steele is a member of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute-led Earth First Origins project, which has been awarded a $9 million grant by NASA's Astrobiology Program. The...
Ancient Earth crust stored in deep mantle
Washington, D.C.— Scientists have long believed that lava erupted from certain oceanic volcanoes contains materials from the early Earth's crust. But decisive evidence for this phenomenon has proven...
Impact of extinctions ranked using social media technique
A team of researchers including Carnegie's Bob Hazen is using network analysis techniques—made popular through social media applications—to find patterns in Earth's natural...
Washington, D.C.— Carnegie Science is excited to launch a new immersive program called Expedition Earth: Roads to Discovery. These experiences are more than just another lecture series (although, don...
Starting in 2005, the High Lava Plains project is focused on a better understanding of why the Pacific Northwest, specifically eastern Oregon's High Lava Plains, is so volcanically active. This region is the most volcanically active area of the continental United States and it's relatively young. None of the accepted paradigms explain why the magmatic and tectonic activity extend so far east of the North American plate margin. By applying numerous techniques ranging from geochemistry and petrology to active and passive seismic imaging to geodynamic modeling, the researchers examine an assemblage of new data that will provide key information about the roles of lithosphere
Alycia Weinberger
Anat Shahar is pioneering a field that blends isotope geochemistry with high-pressure experiments to examine planetary cores and the Solar System's formation, prior to planet formation, and how the planets formed and differentiated. Stable isotope geochemistry is the study of how physical and chemical processes can cause isotopes—atoms of an element with different numbers of neutrons-- to separate (called isotopic fractionation). Experimental petrology is a lab-based approach to increasing the pressure and temperature of materials to simulate conditions in the interior Earth or other planetary bodies.
Rocks and meteorites consist of isotopes that contain chemical
Alycia Weinberger wants to understand how planets form, so she observes young stars in our galaxy and their disks, from which planets are born. She also looks for and studies planetary systems.
Studying disks surrounding nearby stars help us determine the necessary conditions for planet formation. Young disks contain the raw materials for building planets and the ultimate architecture of planetary systems depends on how these raw materials are distributed, what the balance of different elements and ices is within the gas and dust, and how fast the disks dissipate.
Weinberger uses a variety of observational techniques and facilities, particularly ultra-high spatial-