Carnegie's Paul Butler has been leading work on a multiyear project to carry out the first reconnaissance of all 2,000 nearby Sun-like stars within 150 light-years of the solar system (1 lightyear is about 9.4 trillion kilometers). His team is currently monitoring about 1,700 stars, including 1,000 Northern Hemisphere stars with the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the UCO Lick Observatory telescope in California, and 300 Southern Hemisphere stars with the Anglo-Australian telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The remaining Southern Hemisphere stars are being surveyed with Carnegie's new Magellan telescopes in Chile. By 2010 the researchers hope to have completed their planetary census. They will then be able to tell what percentage of stars have planets, how many systems are similar to our own, and the different characteristics these systems exhibit. The ultimate goal is to find planets that resemble the Earth. Image courtesy NASA

Scientific Area: 
Earth & Planetary Science
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Marilyn Fogel
Carnegie’s Marilyn Fogel posthumously honored by AGU for legacy of interdisciplinary research
October 3, 2022

Washington, DC—Isotope geochemist Marilyn Fogel will be posthumously recognized with the American Geophysical Union’s Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science, which is awarded annually to “an exceptional senior scientist for outstanding creative achievements in research at the intersection of Earth and life sciences.”

Fogel, who died in May, spent 33 years as a Staff Scientist at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington D.C., now the location of the Institution’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, as well as a short stint as a visiting scholar at Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology in California, before moving on to positions

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Louis and Lore Brown at an annual Carnegie celebration
Physicist’s estate to advance geochemistry and cosmochemistry at Carnegie
September 22, 2022

Washington, DC—The estate of the late Carnegie physicist and historian Louis Brown, who died in 2004, and his wife Lore, who died late last year, included a bequest of $4.5 million to support research about the Solar System’s formation and evolution, as well as the planet’s dynamic interior processes.

Lou Brown joined Carnegie in 1961 and, for the next 15 years, headed up the nuclear physics program at the Institution’s former Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, which is now part of our Earth and Planets Laboratory.

Eventually, his work shifted to instrumentation for isotope geology. He was involved with designing and constructing several

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Michael Walter
Carnegie’s Michael Walter honored by American Geophysical Union
September 7, 2022

Washington, DC—Earth and Planets Laboratory Director Michael Walter, an experimental petrologist who studies deep-Earth minerals and melts to elucidate the formation and evolution of our planet’s dynamic interior, will be honored with the American Geophysical Union’s Normal L. Bowen Award at the organization’s annual Fall Meeting in December.

The Bowen prize is the top recognition for a scientist in AGU’s Volcanology, Geochemistry and Petrology section. It presented each year to an individual who has made “outstanding contributions” to the field, either in the form of a single, groundbreaking paper, or a cumulative set of advancements over

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An artist’s conception of WASP-39 b, courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Olmsted
First clear, detailed, indisputable evidence of carbon dioxide found in exoplanet atmosphere
August 24, 2022

Washington, DC—The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear, detailed, indisputable evidence for atmospheric carbon dioxide ever detected on a planet outside the Solar System. The discovery was announced by the mission’s Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Team, which includes four Carnegie astronomers—Munazza Alam, Anjali Piette, Peter Gao, and Johanna Teske. It will be published next week in Nature and can be found online here.

As part of the team’s efforts in July and August, JWST observed a gas giant planet, called WASP-39 b, which orbits a Sun-like star 700 light-years from Earth. Their finding offers thrilling

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Marilyn Fogel Endowed Fund for Internships

Established in June of 2016 with a generous gift of $50,000 from Marilyn Fogel and Christopher Swarth, the Marilyn Fogel Endowed Fund for Internships will provide support for “very young budding scientists” who wish to “spend a summer getting their feet wet in research for the very first time.”  The income from this endowed fund will enable high school students and undergraduates to conduct mentored internships at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory and Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, DC starting in the summer of 2017.

Marilyn Fogel’s thirty-three year career at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory (1977-2013), followed

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Carnegie Science Venture Grants

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Following Andrew Carnegie’s founding encouragement of liberal discovery-driven research, the Carnegie Institution for Science offers its scientists a new resource for pursuing bold ideas.

Carnegie Science Venture grants are internal awards of up to $100,000 that are intended to foster entirely new directions of research by teams of scientists that ignore departmental boundaries. Up to six adventurous investigations may be funded each year. The period of the award is two

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Rosetta Mission

Andrew Steele joins the Rosetta team as a co-investigator working on the COSAC instrument aboard the Philae lander (Fred Goesmann Max Planck Institute - PI). On 12 November 2014 the Philae system will be deployed to land on the comet and begin operations. Before this, several analyses of the comet environment are scheduled from an approximate orbit of 10 km from the comet. The COSAC instrument is a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer that will measure the abundance of volatile gases and organic carbon compounds in the coma and solid samples of the comet.
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The Anglo-Australian Planet Search

The Anglo-Australian Planet Search (AAPS) is a long-term program being carried out on the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) to search for giant planets around more than 240 nearby Sun-like stars. The team, including Carnegie scientists,  uses the "Doppler wobble" technique to search for these otherwise invisible extra-solar planets, and achieve the highest long-term precision demonstrated by any Southern Hemisphere planet search.
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Ana Bonaca

Ana Bonaca is Staff Member at Carnegie Observatories. Her specialty is stellar dynamics and her research aims to uncover the structure and evolution of our galaxy, the Milky Way, especially the dark matter halo that surrounds it. In her research, she uses space- and ground-based telescopes to measure the motions of stars, and constructs numerical experiments to discover how dark matter affected them.

She arrived in September 2021 from Harvard University where she held a prestigious Institute for Theory and Computation Fellowship. 

Bonaca studies how the uneven pull of our galaxy’s gravity affects objects called globular clusters—spheres made up of a million

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Peter Gao

Peter Gao's research interests include planetary atmospheres; exoplanet characterization; planet formation and evolution; atmosphere-surface-interior interactions; astrobiology; habitability; biosignatures; numerical modeling.

His arrival in September 2021 continued Carnegie's longstanding tradition excellence in exoplanet discovery and research, which is crucial as the field prepares for an onslaught of new data about exoplanetary atmospheres when the next generation of telescopes come online.

Gao has been a part of several exploratory teams that investigated sulfuric acid clouds on Venus, methane on Mars, and the atmospheric hazes of Pluto. He also

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Anne Pommier

Anne Pommier's research is dedicated to understanding how terrestrial planets work, especially the role of silicate and metallic melts in planetary interiors, from the scale of volcanic magma reservoirs to core-scale and planetary-scale processes.

She joined Carnegie in July 2021 from U.C. San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she investigated the evolution and structure of planetary interiors, including our own Earth and its Moon, as well as Mars, Mercury, and the moon Ganymede.

Pommier’s experimental petrology and mineral physics work are an excellent addition to Carnegie’s longstanding leadership in lab-based mimicry of the

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Johanna Teske

Johanna Teske became the first new staff member to join Carnegie’s newly named Earth and Planets Laboratory (EPL) in Washington, D.C., on September 1, 2020. She has been a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA, since 2018. From 2014 to 2017 she was the Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellow—a joint position between Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (now part of EPL) and the Carnegie Observatories.

Teske is interested in the diversity in exoplanet compositions and the origins of that diversity. She uses observations to estimate exoplanet interior and atmospheric compositions, and the chemical environments of their formation

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