Anat Shahar

Carnegie-led team wins $1.5 million grant to study atmospheres of the galaxy’s most common exoplanets

Carnegie’s Anat Shahar is the lead investigator on an interdisciplinary, multi-institution research team that this spring was awarded nearly $1.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to understand the chemical makeup of our galaxy’s most common planets with a goal of developing a framework for detecting chemical signatures of life on distant worlds.

A back-scattered electron image showing one of the products of Chabot’s lab at APL mimicry of the core crystallization process. Liquid metal is on the right and solid metal is on the left. Image is courtesy of Nancy Chabot and Peng Ni.

New work led by Carnegie’s Peng Ni and Anat Shahar uncovers new details about our Solar System’s oldest planetary objects, which broke apart in long-ago collisions to form iron-rich meteorites.