UA Science
Chad Bender (left), working on NEID (center), Thomas Beatty (right)

Dr. Chad Bender and Dr. Thomas Beatty and the NEID Team See First Light With the Star 51 Peg

The new NEID instrument, now installed at the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Southern Arizona, has made its first observations (you can see the first-object spectrum of 51 Peg HERE) . The NSF-NASA funded instrument is designed to measure the motion of nearby stars with extreme precision — roughly three times better than the previous generation of state-of-the-art instruments — allowing us to detect, determine the mass of, and characterize exoplanets as small as Earth. Steward's Dr Chad Bender is the Instrument Scientist and Dr Thomas Beatty is on the Science Team.

Perched atop Tohono O'odham Nation land in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert, exoplanet-hunting spectrograph NEID is now embarking on discovering planets orbiting stars other than our sun with a similar mass to Earth's. The announcement of first light was made at a press conference held Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting...

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How To Make Buckyballs In Space

Fullerenes are very large carbon molecules, such as C60 and C70. It has been difficult to understand how such large, complicated  molecules can form in space. Recently, a group of UArizona scientists (J. J. Bernal, P. Haenecour, T. J. Zega, and L. M. Ziurys) in Astronomy, Arizona Radio Observatory, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Planetary Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, and their colleagues, published laboratory research and meteorite research that provides a mechanism for making this complicated molecule in space. Nature Magazine also published a "News & Views" article on this work. We are pleased that Regents' Professor Lucy Ziurys (Astronomy Dept, and Dept of Chemistry and Biochemistry) and her colleagues have...

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