A team including several Carnegie scientists has developed a form of ultrastrong, lightweight carbon that is also elastic and electrically conductive. A material with such a unique combination of properties could serve a wide variety of applications from aerospace engineering to military armor. Carbon is an element of seemingly infinite possibilities. This is because the…
Our Galaxy’s Most Mysterious Star is Even Stranger Than Astronomers Thought
A star known by the unassuming name of KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while it was being monitored by…
Discovery One-Ups Tatooine, Finds Twin Stars Hosting Three Giant Exoplanets
A team of Carnegie scientists has discovered three giant planets in a binary star system composed of stellar ”twins” that are also effectively siblings of our Sun. One star hosts two planets and the other hosts the third. The system represents the smallest-separation binary in which both stars host planets that has ever been observed.…
The Rise and Fall of Galaxy Formation
An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90 percent of cosmic history. Their work, which includes some of the most sensitive astronomical measurements made to date, is being published in The Astrophysical Journal. The FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) has built a multicolored photo album…
Hunt for Ninth Planet Reveals New Extremely Distant Solar System Objects
In the race to discover a proposed ninth planet in our Solar System, Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of Northern Arizona University have observed several never-before-seen objects at extreme distances from the Sun in our Solar System. Sheppard and Trujillo have now submitted their latest discoveries to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center…
Brown Dwarfs Reveal Exoplanets’ Secrets
Brown dwarfs are smaller than stars, but more massive than giant planets. As such, they provide a natural link between astronomy and planetary science. However, they also show incredible variation when it comes to size, temperature, chemistry, and more, which makes them difficult to understand, too. New work led by Carnegie’s Jacqueline Faherty surveyed various…
1917 Astronomical Plate Has First-Ever Evidence of Exoplanetary System
You can never predict what treasure might be hiding in your own basement. We didn’t know it a year ago, but it turns out that a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from our Carnegie Observatories’ collection shows the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun. This unexpected find was recognized…
New Tool Refines Exoplanet Search
Planet-hunting is an ongoing process that’s resulting in the discovery of more and more planets orbiting distant stars. But as the hunters learn more about the variety among the tremendous number of predicted planets out there, it’s important to refine their techniques. New work led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, Caltech’s Peter Gao, and Peter Plavchan…
Young, Unattached Jupiter Analog Found in Solar Neighborhood
A team of astronomers from Carnegie and the University of Western Ontario has discovered one of the youngest and brightest free-floating, planet-like objects within relatively close proximity to the Sun. The paper reporting these results will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. At an age of only 10 million years, which means it’s practically a…
Mercury’s Mysterious ‘Darkness’ Revealed
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 darkness is controlled by the abundance of iron-rich minerals. These are known to be rare at Mercury’s surface, so what is the “darkening agent” there? About a year…