On August 17, a team of four Carnegie astronomers provided the first-ever glimpse of two neutron stars colliding, opening the door to a new era of astronomy. Along with colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, the team used the Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory to discover the light produced by the merger, pinpointing the origin of a gravitational wave signal less than 11 hours after it was detected.

  Remote sensing maps of the forest canopy in Peru test the strength of current forest protections and identify new regions for conservation effort, according to a report led by Carnegie's Greg Asner published in Science.

Commonly referred to as “chemtrails” or “covert geoengineering”, the alleged evidence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying programme can actually be easily explained by well-understood physical and chemical processes. Carnegie Science, University of California Irvine, and the nonprofit organisation Near Zero have conducted a new study, which finds that, no, they are in fact just condensation.

Researchers, led by Carnegie's Viktor Struzhkin, have experimentally produced a class of materials blending hydrogen with sodium that could alter the superconductivity landscape and could be used for hydrogen-fuel cell storage. The research is published in Nature Communications. It had been predicted that certain hydrogen-rich compounds consisting of multiple atoms of hydrogen with alkali metals like lithium, potassium or sodium, could ...

New work led by Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné, Caltech's Peter Gao, and Peter Plavchan from Missouri State University reports on a technological upgrade for one method of finding planets or confirming other planetary detections. The result is published by The Astrophysical Journal. One of the most-popular and successful techniques for finding and confirming planets is called the radial velocity method. 

For the first time scientists have looked at the net balance of the three major greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—for every region of Earth's landmasses. They found surprisingly, that human-induced emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from ecosystems overwhelmingly surpass the ability of the land to soak up carbon dioxide emissions, which makes the terrestrial biosphere a contributor to climate change.