New and exciting activities in the
McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences
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Nobel laureate Andrea Ghez to deliver the 2026 McDonnell Distinguished Lectures
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| How do you prove a black hole exists? During her March visit to WashU, Andrea Ghez will explain how decades of precise measurements turned the idea of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy into scientific certainty.
Few scientists have answered that question more definitively than Andrea Ghez.
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Recent News From McDonnell Center Fellows
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Sun sets on the Sunlight glacier
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The glacier located near Sunlight Peak, Wyo., has been its icy self since the Yellowstone region’s last major glaciation occurred some 20,000 years ago. The bulk of Sunlight’s ice has remained ensconced in its northern Rocky Mountain keep for many thousands of years. But that is now changing, according to research from scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.
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According to a study published in a special issue of the Annals of Glaciology, the Sunlight glacier system is melting up to 50 centimeters a year, with between 5 and 20 meters of total ice left in place. The new estimates were determined by a multi-institution team led by Tyler Meng, a postdoctoral researcher in the radar geophysics lab of Roger Michaelides.
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McDonnell Center Fellows in the News
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Recent Publications by McDonnell Center Fellows
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Neuman, M., Holzheid, A., Lodders, K., Fegley, B., Wang, K., et al. (2026). Moderately Volatile Elemental Depletion and Potassium Isotope Fractionation during Evaporation in Laser-Heating Aerodynamic-Levitation Experiments. Geochimica Et Cosmochimica Acta, 418, 50–64.
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Particle Acceleration in Highly Magnetized Plasmas
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Astrophysics & Space Sciences Seminar
Luca Comisso
Columbia University
Today, Friday, March 6
9:00am, Compton 241
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| Earth's Core and Mantle: immiscible(ish) but intertwined
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EEPS Colloquium
Stephen Zatman Memorial Lecture
Harriet Lau
Brown University
Thursday, March 19
11:30am, Rudolph 301
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EEPS Brown Bag
EEPS & GRI are hosting this team-based program. Open to undergrads, grads, and postdocs in any field.
Friday, March 20
12:00pm, Rudolph 301
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| How to Detect & Characterize Exoplanets
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St. Louis Astronomical Society
Marc Ollivier
Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale
Friday, March 20
7:30pm, McDonnell 162
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2026 McDonnell Distinguished Lecture
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Andrea M. Ghez, professor of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, is one of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and is director of UCLA’s Galactic Center Group.
In 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her independent discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole in the Milky Way’s galactic center.
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| McDonnell Center Contacts |
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Compiled and edited by Alison Verbeck. Please send any contributions to alison@wustl.edu.
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© 2026 All rights reserved
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