Spotlight on Astronomy

A new neighbor of the Milky Way in the constellation Leo, has been discovered with the Arecibo telescope through its radio emission by the ALFALFA survey, led by Professors Riccardo Giovanelli and Martha Haynes.

The April 25 paper published in the journal Science provides the first direct evidence of small meteoroids, around a half-inch to several yards in size, breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings.

Assistant Professor Dominik Riechers and his team have discovered a very distant galaxy which is converting its molecular gas into stars at a huge rate -- nearby 2000 times more than our own Milky Way Galaxy forms stars. Read more at: http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2013/starburst634/

In March, the CCAT Board met for the first time in Santiago, Chile. (more)

A paper coauthored by Alex Hayes and Jonathan Lunine, has won the "2012 Publication Award for Outstanding Research Paper in an Externally Refereed Publication" by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

A Cornell astronomer has been chosen to play a key role in a mission to better understand how the universe has been expanding and of what it is made.

Chunks of hydrocarbon ice may float atop the lakes and seas of Saturn's huge moon Titan, a new study reveals.

I'm Leo Stein, and I'm very happy to have joined the Astronomy Department at Cornell this Fall. I will be a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow for three years here at Cornell. Before coming to Cornell, I was a graduate student in astrophysics at MIT (working with Scott Hughes, a Cornell alumnus) and received my Ph.D. in 2012.

In Fall 2012, Dominik Riechers joined the department as its newest faculty member. He is an observational astronomer with wide interest in galaxies and galaxy evolution.