Friday, January 23, 2026

New and exciting activities in the
McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences

Recent News From McDonnell Center Fellows

WashU faculty and students search for a hidden hazard in a tornado’s path

The EF-3 tornado that touched down in Greater St. Louis last May left a 20-mile path of destruction. It knocked down trees, snapped power poles, and severely damaged hundreds of houses and apartment buildings from DeBaliviere Place to the North Riverfront, as well as the Wydown neighborhood in Clayton. Much of the obvious debris has already been cleaned up, but the disaster may have left behind a hidden threat that could linger for many years.

 “We’re concerned that the tornado may have released lead into the community,” said Jeffrey Catalano. To address that concern, Catalano has joined CLEAN STL, a project that will test soil and air samples in the tornado’s path for lead, an insidious contaminant that is often left in the wake of floods, fires, and other destructive events.

Earthquake shakes central Illinois early Tuesday morning

Michael Wysession was interviewed by KSDK on Tuesday, January 20, after a small earthquake shook the metro area early that morning.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed a 3.8 magnitude earthquake happened at 1:27 a.m. Tuesday, about 5 1/2 miles underground near Ohlman, Illinois, which is about 90 miles northeast of St. Louis.

McDonnell Center Fellows in the News

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a top candidate for hosting alien life.
But it may lack the geologic activity needed to birth microbes
Paul Byrne | Smithsonian Magazine

Recent Publications by McDonnell Center Fellows

Dev, P. S. B., Goswami, S., Pachhar, D., & Shukla, S. K. (2026). Scalar-induced neutrinoless double beta decay in SU(5). Journal of High Energy Physics, 2026(1). 

Spohn, T., Byrne, P., et al. (2026). Exo-Geoscience Perspectives Beyond Habitability. Space Science Reviews, 222(1), 9. 

Joy, K., Jolliff, B., et al. (2025). It’s Not Just a Phase: Over 50 Years of Lunar Sample Science. Elements, 21(5), 327–332. 

Bernardi, D., Yuan, Y., & Chen, A. Y. (2025b). Global kinetic simulations of monster shocks and their emission. Physical Review Letters, 135(26). 

Sorabella, N. M., Daylan, T., et al. (2026). An anomalous symmetric flare observed in the single-lined spectroscopic binary TIC 380907942: Assessing self-lensing and alternative hypotheses. The Astrophysical Journal, 997(1), 3. 

Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions and the Quest for New and Precision Physics Searches in Neutrino Experiments

Physics Colloquium
Vishvas Pandey, Fermilab
Wednesday, January 28
3:00pm, Crow 204

Integrating Forces, Radiation, Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics and the Many Implications for the Physical Sciences

EEPS Colloquium
Anne Hofmeister, WashU
Retirement Lecture
Thursday, January 29
11:30am, Rudolph 301

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Interim Director: William McKinnon
Associate Director: Michael Nowak
Assistant to the Director: Vickie Gee
Communications Specialist: Alison Verbeck

Compiled and edited by Alison Verbeck. Please send any contributions to alison@wustl.edu.

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