Press Releases

Lyman Thomas Aldrich, 95, who worked as a geophysicist and geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) for 34 years, including a stint as its acting director, died Wednesday, May 1, at a retirement community in Mitchellville, MD.

Carnegie staff scientist Greg Asner has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries elected “in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” The total number of active members now stands at 2,179.

Forecasting volcanic eruptions with success is heavily dependent on recognizing well-established patterns of pre-eruption unrest in the monitoring data. But in order to develop better monitoring procedures, it is also crucial to understand volcanic eruptions that deviate from these patterns. New research from a team led by Carnegie’s Diana Roman retrospectively documented and analyzed the period immediately preceding the 2009 eruption of the Redoubt volcano in Alaska, which was characterized by an abnormally long period of pre-eruption seismic activity that’s normally associated with short-term warnings of eruption.

Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly unusual. A team including Carnegie’s Michele Fumagalli used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to set a lower limit for the blazar's redshift (z ≥ 0.6035). An object’s redshift value is a measurement of how much the wavelength of the light from it that reaches Earth is stretched by the expansion of the Universe. Thus, it reveals the object’s age and distance. This blazar’s redshift corresponds to a distance of at least 7.4 billion light-years.