Cornell scientists are developing a library of basalt-based spectral signatures that not only will help reveal the composition of planets outside of our solar system, but also could demonstrate evidence of water on those exoplanets.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Nearly 400 active volcanoes punctuate the Jupiter moon Io. Using flyby data from NASA’s Juno mission that examines the volcanoes, doctoral student Madeline Pettine led a group of Cornell astronomers to study a fundamental process in planetary formation and evolution: tidal heating.
By examining Jupiter’s moon Io – the most volcanically active place in the solar system – Cornell astronomers can study a vital process in planetary formation and evolution: tidal heating.
Best-selling writer Cory Doctorow, filmmaker Louis Massiah ’77 and award-winning journalist P. (Palagummi) Sainath have been appointed as the latest Cornell A.D. White Professors-at-Large.
Margaret A. Marchaterre/Provided
A male midshipman fish, left, and a female swim in shallow Northern California waters. Their midbrain plays a key role in initiating and patterning trains of sounds used in vocal communication.
The midbrain in these fish may serve as a useful model for how mammals and other vertebrates, including humans, control vocal expressions.
Elliot Lowndes/Provided
A male ostracod, about the size of a sesame seed, will dance in harmony with other males underwater at night and secrete a glowing mucus to get attention from females.
In sea fireflies’ underwater ballet, the males sway together in perfect, illuminated synchronization, basking in the blue-like glow of their secreted iridescent mucus.
Cornell University file photo
Claudia Goldin ’67 speaks on campus in 2014
The center will connect and amplify the university’s research and scholarship around issues of racial injustice and inequality and its work to develop more just and equitable public policy.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Reduced from polyester fiber, an array of metal-organic frameworks is shown in the Hinestroza lab. Minor changes in the chemical structure can generate a myriad of colors.
A Cornell team has created a way to reuse some polyester compounds to make fabrics and to halt the proliferation of garment waste in landfills.
NASA/JPL/Provided
Even on future cosmic outposts like Mars, depicted in this artistic rendering, humans must consider closely replicating natural conditions found on Earth, according to a new theory called Pancosmorio.
To manage atmospheric carbon dioxide and convert the gas into a useful product, Cornell scientists have dusted off a 120 year old electrochemical equation.
Darren McGee/NYS Governor’s Office
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, right, and artist Meredith Bergmann discuss the Ruth Bader Ginsburg portrait that will be installed at the Great Western Staircase in the state capitol.
"We are both honoring Justice Ginsburg’s legacy as a trailblazer for justice and gender equality, and also celebrating New York’s history as the birthplace of the women’s rights movement.”
ABC/Eric McCandless
American Idol's superstar judges all agreed that Amara Valerio '24 is headed for Hollywood.
The American Studies major nailed her March 12 audition, making a childhood wish come true.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Ray Halbritter, left, representing the Oneida Indian Nation, and President Martha E. Pollack, sign documents that repatriate ancestral remains from the university to the Oneida Indian Nation.
Gierasch contributed to a wealth of knowledge on the processes of planetary atmospheres and served as a team scientist on the Viking, Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo and Cassini missions for NASA.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
The 11 Cornell students who will be helping delegations at COP27 in Egypt.
Eleven Cornell students, including two from Arts & Sciences, will help delegations from specialized agencies and small countries gain a stronger voice at the United Nations’ COP27 conference.
Both Morrison and Ginsburg graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Citizen scientists Kevin M. Gill and Fernando Garcia Navarro created this colorful, highly artistic view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, taken from JunoCam on the Juno mission’s close flyby Sept. 29. JPL/NASA released this image on Oct. 6.
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.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Léa Bonnefoy ‘15, a post-doctoral researcher, led a team of Cornell scientists to characterize the Dragonfly mission's landing site on Saturn’s moon Titan. The rotorcraft is expected to launch in 2027 and reach that moon in 2034.
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.
European Southern Observatory / L. Calçada
In this illustration, exoplanet CoRoT-7b, which is likely five times the mass of Earth, may well be full of lava landscapes and boiling oceans.
“Climate change is a pressing challenge and we don’t have a moment to lose."
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Doctoral student Abhinav Jindal, standing in front of a Rosetta mission image of Comet 67P, modeled the evolution of smooth terrain on that frozen world.
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.
Credit: NASA/Provided
Evidence of carbon dioxide was found by the new James Webb Space Telescope on exoplanet WASP-39b, which is shown in this artistic rendering.
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.
Shami Chatterjee/Provided
The 500-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as FAST, in Ghizou province, southwest China
Sending out an occasional and informative cosmic ping from more than 3.5 billion light years away, these quick-fire surges provide a pathway for scientists to comprehend the perplexing, mysterious and million-degree intergalactic medium.
Provided
The Soil Factory, a large, unremarkable warehouse on the southern edge of Ithaca, has become a collaboration center in 2021 for students, scientists, artists, community members and everyone in between.
A new Cornell study suggests that solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively.
Fueled by the collaborative spirit of Cornell’s faculty, the 2030 Project is helping to remove silos, activate research and leverage existing expertise across all disciplines to find solutions now.
NASA/JPL/Provided
Scientists have suggested sending an orbiter and probe to Uranus, as their top exploration priority. The voyage would conduct flybys and examine clouds, atmospheric structure, composition, the planet’s rings and moons.
Professors Jonathan I. Lunine and Alexander Hayes played leadership roles in identifying U.S. national scientific priorities through 2033.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Qihao Li, left, Geoff Coates, the Tisch University Professor of Chemistry and Héctor Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry, discuss hydrogen energy.
Cornell chemists and Cornell research-startups aim to propose a Northeast research hub to make hydrogen a viable, clean-energy alternative to carbon-based fuels.
Jack Madden/Provided
With a color catalog based on Earth’s microbes, astronomers can begin to decipher the tint of life on distant, frozen exoplanets, as depicted in this artistic rendering by Jack Madden Ph.D. ’20.
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.
ESA/Rosetta/MPS
A close-up examination of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko reveals dancing gravel, whirling icy debris and transient, movable depressions on its smooth terrain, courtesy of photos from the Rosetta mission.
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.
NASA-JPL-ASU/Provided
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance poses in a planetary selfie last September with the formation known as “Rochette.”
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.
“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.
NASA/JPL
A radar image from the Cassini spacecraft of Titan’s liquid methane and ethane rivers and tributaries.
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.
Shami Chatterjee/Provided
The new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as FAST, in Guizhou, China, where the 1,652 fast radio bursts were detected.
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.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
An artist's rendition of a "hot Jupiter."
Sixteen military veterans participated in a virtual academic boot camp at Cornell July 26 to Aug. 6. The university partnered with the Warrior-Scholar Project for the seventh consecutive year to help recent or soon-to-be military veterans transition into higher education.
Dong Lai, M.S. ’91, Ph.D. ’94, professor of astronomy, has won Cornell’s inaugural Provost Award for Teaching Excellence in Graduate and Professional Degree Programs.
ESA/Mars Express
Mars’ south pole – which looks like creamy swirls in cappuccino – is an icy cap with carbon dioxide and other geologic traits. About a mile below the cap is smectite, a hydrated version of clay.
Astronomers have identified 2,034 nearby star-systems – within 326 light-years – that could find life on Earth by watching our pale blue dot cross our sun.
Four Commencement ceremonies were held May 29-30, spaced out to meet health guidelines. Though campus was less crowded, the campus mood was warm and celebratory.
More than a dozen space industry leaders, capital investors, startup entrepreneurs, a Jet Propulsions Lab manager and Cornell professors gathered virtually for Cornell’s first Space Tech Industry Day/K.K. Wang Day symposium on April 23 – featuring this year’s event theme, “New Opportunities in Space Technology.”
An artistic rendering for how the new North Campus Residential Expansion halls will look in fall 2021.
Using light from the Big Bang, an international team led by Cornell and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has begun to unveil the material which fuels galaxy formation. Lead author is Stefania Amodeo, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in astronomy, who now conducts research at the Observatory of Strasbourg, France.
Catalyzed by a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability grant and prompted by other Cornell eco-friendly research over the past decade like the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute and the university’s Energy Materials Center, the Standard Hydrogen Corporation (SHC) and National Grid announced plans March 11 to build the first hydrogen “energy station” of its kind in the nation.
Jason Koski, Cornell University
Walter LaFeber speaking at the 2016 Dedication of the LaFeber Research Study.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft – currently orbiting Jupiter, flying close approaches to the planet and then out into the realm of the Jovian moons – and the InSight lander, now perched in Mars’ equatorial region, have both received mission extensions, the space agency announced Jan. 8. Cornell astronomers serve key roles on both projects.
An international team of astronomers – including 17 Cornellians – report they have found the first faint, low-frequency whispers that may be gravitational waves from gigantic, colliding black holes in distant galaxies. The findings were obtained from more than 12.5 years of data collected from the national radio telescopes at Green Bank, West Virginia, and the recently collapsed dish at the Arecibo Observatory, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
The large Cornell-designed telescopic “ear” at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which listened for the enlightening crackle of the cosmos for nearly six decades, now hears silence.
Earth’s most arid desert may hold a key to finding life on Mars. Diverse microbes discovered in the clay-rich, shallow soil layers in Chile’s dry Atacama Desert suggest that similar deposits below the Martian surface may contain microorganisms, which could be easily found by future rover missions or landing craft.
Amid the clatter in the days before the presidential election – the long lines at early polls, racial strife, street protests, political ad skirmishes and the streaming patter of television punditry – three College of Arts and Sciences professors offered a bright light at the end of the 2020 tunnel: hope for democracy.
As the frenzied 2020 presidential campaign reaches culmination, the nation’s media, political parties and courts brace for a possible contested outcome. But in the United States and around the world, heated national elections are nothing new.
Three decades after Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that Voyager 1 snap Earth’s picture from billions of miles away – resulting in the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph – two astronomers now offer another unique cosmic perspective:
Lea Bonnefoy ’15, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in astronomy who will soon examine NASA mission landing spots on the Saturnian moon Titan, has been awarded a 2020 L’Oréal-United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Young Talents France Prize For Women in Science. Bonnefoy, who was among 20 doctoral candidates and 15 post-doctoral researchers in all selected to represent France, was recognized in the physical chemistry category.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54, whose legal career in the fight for women’s rights, equal rights and human dignity culminated with her ascent to the U.S. Supreme Court, and who – as an octogenarian – became a cultural hero and arguably the most beloved justice in American history, died Sept. 18 in Washington, D.C. She was 87. Ginsburg died from complications of cancer, according to a statement from the Supreme Court.
In a little more than a decade, samples of rover-scooped Martian soil will rocket to Earth. While scientists are eager to study the red planet’s soils for signs of life, researchers must ponder a considerable new challenge: Acidic fluids – which once flowed on the Martian surface – may have destroyed biological evidence hidden within Mars’ iron-rich clays, according to researchers at Cornell and at Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología.
Mars is about to become a little more red, thanks to the Cornellians who helped develop and calibrate instruments soon bound for the planet. Early on July 30, the NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab’s Mars 2020 spacecraft will roar away from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, bound for Earth’s rusty red neighbor.
The Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability has awarded seven Academic Venture Fund (AVF) interdisciplinary seed grants, totaling $1.1 million, for projects that engage faculty from eight Cornell colleges and 16 academic departments.
When astronomer Joan Schmelz met then-postdoctoral researcher Lisa Kaltenegger a decade ago at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the hottest cosmic theme to study was exoplanet exploration.
The COVID-19 pandemic is keeping people apart, but Cornell students showed that despite physical distancing they can still make meaningful local, regional and global connections.
After examining a dozen types of suns and a roster of planet surfaces, Cornell astronomers have developed a practical model – an environmental color “decoder” – to tease out climate clues for potentially habitable exoplanets in galaxies far away.
The proliferation of medical misinformation on social media and the human experience of social distancing are among the pandemic-related topics to be studied with Rapid Response Fund grants from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
The next generation of powerful Earth- and space-based telescopes will be able to hunt distant solar systems for evidence of life on Earth-like exoplanets – particularly those that chaperone burned-out stars known as white dwarfs. The chemical properties of those far-off worlds could indicate that life exists there. To help future scientists make sense of what their telescopes are showing them, Cornell astronomers have developed a spectral field guide for these rocky worlds.
After spotting a curious pattern in scientific papers – they described exoplanets as being cooler than expected – Cornell astronomers have improved a mathematical model to accurately gauge the temperatures of planets from solar systems hundreds of light-years away.
Cornell astronomers have created five models representing key points from our planet’s evolution, like chemical snapshots through Earth’s own geologic epochs.They will use them as spectral templates in the hunt for Earth-like planets in distant solar systems in the approaching new era of powerful telescopes.
Recyclable plastic containers with the No. 2 designation could become even more popular for manufacturers as plastic milk jugs, dish soap containers and shampoo bottles may soon get an environmental makeover.
Don Banfield ‘87, principal research scientist at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, is the science lead for a suite of sensors aboard InSight.
The Spitzer Space Telescope – with its Cornell-developed infrared spectrograph instrument – has been peering through murky cosmic dust to study the distant heavens for 16 years. Originally scheduled to last 2.5 years, the mission officially will end Jan. 30.Spitzer was the final mission of NASA’s Great Observatories program. The infrared spectrograph portion of the mission ended in 2010.
Yervant Terzian, the Tisch Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy, who studied the physical matter between stars, dedicated his career to education and chaired the department for two decades, died Nov. 25 in Ithaca. Terzian was 80.
Steve Squyres ’78, Ph.D. ’81, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences, who has taught astronomy, conducted research and chaperoned two Mars rovers on their 300 million-mile journey to Earth’s rust-colored neighbor, will retire from Cornell Sept. 22.
Astronomers seeking life on distant planets may want to go for the glow.Harsh ultraviolet radiation flares from red suns, once thought to destroy surface life on planets, might help uncover hidden biospheres. Their radiation could trigger a protective glow from life on exoplanets called biofluorescence, according to new Cornell research.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets, has discovered its first potentially habitable world outside of our own solar system – and an international team of astronomers has characterized the super-Earth, about 31 light-years away.
The White House has recognized four Cornell faculty members – Thomas Hartman, Jenny Kao-Kniffin, Kin Fai Mak and Rebecca Slayton – with prestigious 2019 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The awards were announced July 2.The award is the highest honor bestowed by the federal government to scientific and engineering professionals who are in first stages of their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership.
Cornell astronomers have reached into nature’s color palette from early Earth to create a cosmic “cheat sheet” for looking at distant worlds. By correlating tints and hues, researchers aim to understand where discovered exoplanets may reasonably fall along their own evolutionary spectrum.
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences will honor Cornell astronomy professor Phil Nicholson with the 2019 Harold Masursky Award, a prize for meritorious service to planetary science.
As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft threaded its way through Saturn’s rings to acquire the last drops of data before its fatal plunge into the planet nearly two years ago, it collected spectral information about the enchanting C ring and its bright plateaus.Instead of uncovering definitive scientific answers, the spectral images from the Cassini flyby triggered more questions, according to new research published June 13 in Science.
As students began to line up for Cornell’s 2019 Commencement May 26, the morning skies that threatened rain gave way to rays of sunshine wriggling between the clouds. Families noshed on bagels, cream cheese and coffee in Collegetown before heading to Schoellkopf Field for the pomp and circumstance.
The arc of educational continuity and inspirational teaching was celebrated May 22 at the 31st annual Merrill Presidential Scholars convocation in Willard Straight Hall. Thirty-four seniors – among the very best of the Class of 2019 – honored beloved, guiding-light high school teachers and inspirational Cornell faculty members.
Fresh air, nature and playing outdoors is the perfect prescription for sedentary and sluggish children, Briana Lui ’19 advises. Lui and more than three dozen Cornell seniors presented their undergraduate research at the 17th annual Hunter R. Rawlings III Research Scholars Senior Expo on April 17 in the Physical Sciences Building and the Clark Atrium.
By examining data from the Cassini spacecraft’s last close encounter with Saturn’s moon Titan, scientists have found that its methane-filled lakes are up to 300 feet deep, much deeper than previously thought.
Elizabeth Latham ’20 – calling for kindness throughout the world with her oration, “Feed and You Will Be Fed” – won the ninth annual Harold I. Saperstein ’31 Cornell Student Topical Sermon Contest.
