Science News
Tracking down the forces that shaped our Solar System’s evolution
Meteorites are remnants of the building blocks that formed Earth and the other planets orbiting our Sun. Recent analysis of their isotopic makeup led by Carnegie’s Nicole Nie and published in Science Advances settles a longstanding debate about the geochemical evolution of our Solar System and our home planet.
Read more...New ultrahard diamond glass synthesized
Carnegie’s Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.
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Carnegie’s Alycia Weinberger and collaborators from the University of Texas at Austin and the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute received last month a $1.2 million grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation to develop an instrument for the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile that will enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the planet formation process.
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In the 1990s, scientists discovered the first planet orbiting another star. Just thirty years later, we know of a staggering 4000+ worlds outside of our own Solar System. With a solid spread of planets to choose from, some scientists have shifted focus from the discovery of planets to something even rarer than the planets themselves—they’re looking for life.
But it turns out that to find life from light-years away, we first have to know what isn’t life.
The first-ever silicate mineral recovered from the Earth’s lower mantle has been named after emeritus Carnegie scientist Ho-kwang “Dave” Mao, an experimental geophysicist whose work redefined our understanding of how materials behave under the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found inside Earth and other planets.
Read more...Ryugu samples arrive on campus
Samples of the asteroid Ryugu finally arrived at the EPL campus in mid-August 2021 after being delivered to Earth by JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 mission in late 2020. The arrival of Ryugu samples is pivotal for both scientists on campus and the entire field of cosmochemistry.
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