Friday, March 20, 2026

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

Nobel Laureate Andrea Ghez to Deliver
Spring McDonnell Distinguished Lectures

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.

The campus community is warmly invited to attend these special lectures.

Our Galactic Center: A Unique Laboratory for the Physics & Astrophysics of Black Holes

Colloquium - Wednesday, March 25
Reception - 3:45pm
Colloquium - 4:30pm
Wilson 214

From the Possibility to the Certainty of a Supermassive Black Hole

Public Lecture - Thursday, March 26

7:00pm
Whitaker 100

Recent News From McDonnell Center Fellows

Earth Made Its Own Nuclear Reactor—2 Billion Years Ago

About 2 billion years ago—long before the dinosaurs but not so long after the first microbes added a huge amount of oxygen to Earth's air—several underground nuclear reactors were sputtering away deep within a seam of rich uranium ore.

Alex Meshik of Washington University in St. Louis has studied the traces of the Oklo reactors. 

Recent Publications by McDonnell Center Fellows

Stephan, T., Amari, S., et al. (2026). Correlated molybdenum, ruthenium, and barium isotope anomalies in high-density presolar graphite grains. The European Physical Journal A, 62(3). 

Chambers-Wall, G., Pastore, S., Piarulli, M., et al. (2026). Three-nucleon lepton-number-violating potentials in chiral effective field theory and their matrix elements in light nuclei. Physical Review. C, 113(2). 

Bieryla, A., Daylan, T., et al. (2026). TOI-6692 b: An Eccentric 130 Day Period Giant Planet with a Single Transit from TESS. The Astronomical Journal, 171(4), 203. 

Marin, F., Gau, E., Hu, K., Krawczynski, H., Rodriguez, N., et al. (2026). IXPE and VLT /FORS2 polarimetry challenge the Seyfert-1.9 classification of MCG-05-23-16. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 707, A154. 

Zhou, Q., Zeigler, R. A., Jolliff, B. L., et al. (2026). Zircon U-PB Geochronology of lunar meteorite Dhofar 1442: Implications for lunar impact history and the Late Heavy Bombardment. Journal of Earth Science. 

Scott, M. G.,  Daylan, T., et al. (2026). Two temperate Earth- and Neptune-sized planets orbiting fully convective M dwarfs. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 547(1). 

Arora, S., Dev, P. B., et al. (2026). Leptogenesis from dark matter coannihilation. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2026(02), 078. 

Ashtari, R., Daylan, T., et al. (2026). Heat Reveals What Clouds Conceal: Global Carbon and Longitudinally Asymmetric Chemistry on LTT 9779 b. The Astronomical Journal, 171(4), 215. 

Maitra, W., Dev, P. S. B., et al. (2026). Dark-matter-enhanced probe of relic neutrino clustering. Physical Review. D, 113(4). 

Billings, K., & Skemer, P. (2026). Corrigendum to “Evolving microstructure during experimental deformation of Maryland diabase” [Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 627 (2024), 118564]. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 681, 119953. 

Earth Data Challenge

EEPS Brown Bag
EEPS & GRI are hosting this team-based program. Open to undergrads, grads, and postdocs in any field.
TODAY, Friday, March 20
12:00pm, Rudolph 301

How to Detect & Characterize Exoplanets

St. Louis Astronomical Society
Marc Ollivier
Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale
TONIGHT, Friday, March 20
7:30pm, McDonnell 162

Planet Formation and Evolution Through a Statistical Lens

Physics Colloquium
Sarah Blunt
UC Santa Cruz
Tuesday, March 24
2:00pm, Compton 340

2026 McDonnell Distinguished Lectures

Our Galactic Center: A Unique Laboratory for the Physics & Astrophysics of Black Holes

MCSS Colloquium
2026 McDonnell Distinguished Lectures
Andrea Ghez
University of California, Los Angeles
Wednesday, March 25
Reception: 3:45pm
4:30pm, Wilson 214

From the Possibility to the Certainty of a Supermassive Black Hole

MCSS Public Lecture
2026 McDonnell Distinguished Lectures
Andrea Ghez
University of California, Los Angeles
Thursday, March 26
7:00pm, Whitaker 100

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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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