Astronomy Essentials

Stéphane Udry

Stéphane Udry is an astronomer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and is involved in the search for exoplanets.. He and his team, in 2007, discovered a possibly terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, approximately 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. He also led the…read more »

Stéphane Udry: Evidence of billions of rocky, habitable planets in our galaxy

Chris Field

Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and Faculty Director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Field’s research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale. He has, for two decades, led major…read more »

David Stuart

In 2004 David Stuart was appointed as the Linda and David Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing. His interests in the traditional cultures of Mesoamerica are wide-ranging, but his primary research focuses is the archaeology and epigraphy of ancient Maya civilization. His early work on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs led to a MacArthur…read more »

David Stuart on the Mayan calendar and 2012 doomsday predictions

Kristin O’Brien

Kristin O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Biology University of Alaska Institute of Arctic Biology. She is interested in the unique biochemical and physiological characteristics that have evolved in fishes living in the chronically cold environment of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean. One of the most striking characteristics among the Antarctic fishes of the family Channichthyidae, known…read more »

Kristin O’Brien: Antarctic icefishes have translucent bodies and blood

Sukanya Chakrabarti

Sukanya Chakarbarti is faculty member in the physics department at Florida Atlantic University. She researches the dynamical evolution of galaxies, with the goal of developing astrophysical probes of fundamental physics. Chakrabarti works on understanding galaxy evolution by performing hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical simulations of galaxies combined with radiative transfer calculations. Dr. Chakrabarti has co-authored over 30…read more »

Sukanya Chakrabarti maps dark matter from ripples of passing satellites