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CSI explores factors that determine if a planet or moon can host life and how we could find it by bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines, from sciences, engineering to media who work together with some of the planet’s most talented students at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral level.
When we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities…
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Purple bacteria is one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of Earth-like planets orbiting different stars, and would produce a distinctive "light fingerprint," Cornell scientists report.
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The clues we find on exoplanets could be as strange as a bioluminescent glow or a rainbow hue, as astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger describes in “Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos.”
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"Have dinosaurs evolved on other worlds? Could we spot a planet of glowing organisms? What nearby star systems are positioned to observe Earth passing in front of the sun? These are just a few of the questions that Lisa Kaltenegger has joyfully tackled. As the founding director of the Carl Sagan ...
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The three-year postdoctoral fellowship, granted to Lígia Fonseca Coelho and Zach Ulibarri, provides recipients with resources, freedom, and flexibility to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy.
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Samples of Martian rock and soil could be stranded if Congress doesn't adequately fund a NASA mission to retrieve them, Astronomy Chair Jonathan Lunine told a U.S. House subcommittee on March 21.
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Decades before any probe dips a toe – and thermometer – into the waters of distant ocean worlds, Cornell astrobiologists have devised a way to determine ocean temperatures based on the thickness of their ice shells, effectively conducting oceanography from space.
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With the help of a Cornell astronomy researcher, the first radio telescope ever to land on the moon will lay the foundation for detecting habitable planets in our solar system by observing Earth as if it’s an exoplanet.
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Cornell researchers have created a new version of a microbe to compete economically with E. coli – a bacteria commonly used as a research tool due to its ability to synthesize proteins – to conduct low-cost and scalable synthetic biological experiments.
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