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Global Cornell will host a town hall in December for additional feedback and announce the new Global Grand Challenge theme in the coming year.
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“This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry – chemical reactions initialized by energetic stellar light – on exoplanets.”
/news/webb-telescope-shows-exoplanet-atmosphere-never-seen
"Close-ups of Jupiter and its gorgeous cloud-tops star in the latest batch of images sent back from NASA’s Juno orbiter."
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For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection.
/news/dream-discovering-alien-life-finds-new-hope-1
"A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope for Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection."
Scientists believe Europa’s global ocean contains more than twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined and may be suitable for life.
/news/junos-new-views-heighten-europa-clipper-excitement
Elizabeth Riley, postdoc in psychology, and Eileen Gonzales, postdoc in astronomy, represent the College of Arts and Sciences among the honorees.
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When NASA’s 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches Saturn’s moon in 2034, Cornell’s Léa Bonnefoy '15 will have helped to make it a smooth landing.
/news/scientists-depict-dragonfly-landing-site-saturn-moon-titan
Cornell researchers developed a starter catalog for finding volcanic worlds that feature fiery landscapes and oceans of magma.
/news/synthetic-lava-lab-aids-exoplanet-exploration
Observation team member Eileen Gonzales, 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow, says this is just the beginning.
/news/nasa-releases-first-webb-telescope-image-exoplanet
Astronomers have shown how smooth terrains – a good place to land a spacecraft and to scoop up samples – evolve on the icy world of comets.
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A large international team found molecular evidence of carbon dioxide on the exoplanet WASP-39b, a giant gaseous world orbiting a sun-like star about 700 light-years away.
/news/cornell-helps-detect-co2-first-time-faraway-world
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were” (-Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter 1)
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Faculty respond to the release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
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Jonathan Barrientos is exploring the possibility of life on Earth-like planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets.
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Professors Jonathan I. Lunine and Alexander Hayes played leadership roles in identifying U.S. national scientific priorities through 2033.
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Nikole Lewis will be one of the first to characterize distant exoplanets using infrared data from the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.
/news/glowing-planets-and-chemical-fingerprints
On Cornell’s eighth Giving Day, held March 16, 15,905 alumni, students, faculty, staff, parents and friends from more than 80 countries made gifts totaling a record-breaking $12,268,629.
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As ground-based and space telescopes improve, astronomers need a color-coded guide to compare Earth’s biological microbes to cold, distant exoplanets to grasp their composition.
/news/tint-life-color-catalog-built-find-frozen-worlds
Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team – including researchers from Portugal’s Instituto Superior de Agronomia and Técnico, Canada’s Université Laval in Quebec, and Cornell – has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos...
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After a European spacecraft rendezvoused with Comet 67P about seven years ago, astronomers now have found a cosmic revelation: It emits molecular oxygen drawn from its nucleus.
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NASAFifty years ago, on March 2nd, 1972, Pioneer 10 touched off from Cape Canaveral on humanity’s first mission to the outer solar system. Just five months before the first moon landing in 1969, NASA approved a pair of spacecraft designated Pioneer F and G. They would use entirely nuclear power and travel faster than any previous manmade...
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Gifts allow the College to fulfill its mission: preparing students to do the greatest good in the world.
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In this Interesting Engineering article, read about how space agencies from around the world will be venturing farther out into space than ever before. This includes returning to the Moon (perhaps to stay this time), exploring Mars, and maybe even establishing human settlements on both. Beyond that, there are even proposals for establishing...
/news/taking-earth-us-space-exploration-sustainable
For the past year, two Cornell doctoral students have been living, thinking and working on the red planet Mars, digitally commuting from our own blue world.
/news/rock-stars-mars-students-look-life-big-red-planet
In the future, mass transportation will almost certainly involve self-driving vehicles. The aerospace industry is pushing that idea even further, all the way to space, but the results for autonomous small spacecraft have been mixed.Now, a Cornell Space Systems Design Studio project that demonstrates the technology’s potential is poised to take...
/news/student-built-cubesats-rendezvous-space
Far above the populated towns on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of western Africa, Esteban Gazel and Kyle Dayton carried equipment from their car and hiked toward the erupting Cumbre Vieja volcano’s active vents.Gazel, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Engineering, and...
/news/cornell-scientists-coolly-recall-fiery-volcano-visit
The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December 2021. Regarded as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will peer deep into space and take images of distant astronomical objects. Most of the images we see from Hubble show galaxies, star clusters, or gas clouds. Here’s an image taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3,...
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The Rhode Island School of Design has awarded astrophysicist Jack Madden the annual Dorner Prize for his digital project exploring the confines of language.Read the full story.
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The program connects undergraduates in A&S with opportunities to work side by side on research with Cornell faculty from across the College.
/news/nexus-scholars-program-applications-now-open
A new study co-led by a Cornell researcher has identified serpentinite – a green rock that looks a bit like snakeskin and holds fluids in its mineral structures – as a key driver of the oxygen recycling process, which helped create and maintain the sustaining atmosphere for life on Earth.“This cycle is a really a big deal,” said Esteban Gazel,...
/news/recycling-tectonic-plates-key-driver-earths-oxygen-budget
A quarter of the faculty from the Department of Astronomy participated in the newly released decadal survey sponsored by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Air Force.
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“This answers questions that scientists have asked for 200 years," said co-author Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy.
/news/juno-craft-provides-first-3d-view-jupiters-deep-storms
The Nexus Scholars program will leverage the student-to-faculty ratio and the vibrant research enterprise in A&S to expand opportunities for students, while also enhancing the culture of collaborative scholarship at Cornell.
/news/new-program-expands-undergrad-research-opportunitiesWhat seemed a cosmic trickle almost a decade ago now appears as a rapid-fire barrage from across the universe.An international team of astronomers including Cornell researchers have detected 1,652 independent millisecond explosions – called fast radio bursts, or FRBs – over a period of only 47 days, from a source about 3 billion light-years away...
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Among the Cornell faculty, Esteban Gazel arguably conducts the hottest research. But this time the geochemist should be safe from magma heat.Gazel, associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and doctoral student Kyle Dayton will join a small, elite team of international researchers on Oct. 21 at the newly erupted...
/news/cornell-scientists-join-team-live-volcanic-eruption
Three A&S faculty members have been selected to receive Stephen H. Weiss Awards honoring excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring, President Martha E. Pollack announced Oct. 18.
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A Cornell-led team of astronomers has published the final maps of Titan’s liquid methane rivers and tributaries, as seen by NASA’s late Cassini mission.
/news/titans-river-maps-may-advise-dragonflys-sedimental-journey
Ten faculty members have been selected to receive Stephen H. Weiss Awards honoring excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring, President Martha E. Pollack announced Oct. 18.“The Weiss Awards highlight the centrality of undergraduate education at Cornell, and I’m delighted that we’re able to recognize our exceptional faculty for their...
/news/weiss-teaching-awards-honor-10-exceptional-faculty-0
Geographically and logistically, Antarctica is about as far away from anywhere as you can get on this planet. Yet in the scope of our solar system, Earth’s southernmost continent is right in our own backyard.Britney Schmidt is in Antarctica through February 2022 with a small team of researchers to explore the confluence of glaciers, floating ice...
/news/schmidt-exploring-earths-oceans-reach-europa-0Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet that survived its star’s death. Known as MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, the planet orbits a white dwarf some 6,500 light years from here, potentially offering a glimpse into our cosmic future. The researchers reported the new discovery in the journal, Nature.Lisa Kaltenegger, who was not involved in the...
/news/surviving-stars-demise-discovery-adds-proof-planetary-resilience-0
Astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute, comments on the discovery of MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, a Jupiter-sized planet that survived its star’s death.
/news/surviving-stars-demise-discovery-adds-proof-planetary-resilienceConsidered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.An international team, led by researchers at Cornell, University of Toronto and Queen’s University Belfast,...
/news/spectrum-reveals-extreme-exoplanet-even-more-exotic-0
An international team led by Cornell researchers has discovered ionized calcium on the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet.
/news/spectrum-reveals-extreme-exoplanet-even-more-exotic
When it comes to directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets orbiting faraway stars, seeing isn’t always believing.A new Cornell study finds that next-generation telescopes used to see exoplanets could confuse Earth-like planets with other types of planets in the same solar system.With today’s telescopes, dim distant planets are hard to see against...
/news/planet-confusion-could-slow-earth-exoplanet-exploration-0
Cornell University, long recognized as one of the leading universities in space science and technology, released a new certificate program that will prepare engineers with the foundational knowledge needed to launch them into a career in aerospace engineering and commercial spaceflight.The space technology industry has made great strides with...
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Ngoc Truong is a doctoral candidate in geological sciences from Hanoi, Vietnam. After attending the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi as an undergraduate, he chose to pursue further study at Cornell due to its tradition of involvement with spacecraft missions. Truong’s recent research on volcanic activity on Venus was picked up by...
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In this Nautilus article, Prof. Lisa Kaltenegger writes about how she and colleague Jacky Faherty identified 1,715 stars in our solar neighborhood that could have seen Earth in the past 5,000 years.Read the full story here.
/news/where-aliens-could-be-watching-us
Ngoc Truong chose to study at Cornell because of its tradition of faculty/staff/student involvement with spacecraft missions and its many notable planetary scientists and astrophysicists such as Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter.
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