Friday, August 14, 2026

The MCSS Messenger

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

Recent News From McDonnell Center Fellows

The search for planets orbiting white dwarfs

Zifan Lin and Tansu Daylan have been selected to lead one of the inaugural General Investigator programs for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Lin serves as principal investigator and Daylan as co-principal investigator of the program.

The program, Transiting White Dwarf Exoplanets with the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, will search for planets orbiting white dwarf stars using observations from Roman's GBTDS.

Artist's illustration of WD 1856b, a giant planet, orbits its dim white dwarf star every day and a half. Credit:NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Building Roman’s definitive strong-lens catalog

Examples of strong gravitational lenses (Bryce Wedig)

Some of the universe's most powerful telescopes are created by nature itself. They are massive galaxies whose gravity bends and magnifies light from galaxies lying far behind them, creating what astronomers call strong gravitational lensing. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to discover more than 100,000 strong gravitational lenses.

A newly selected Roman Cycle 1 General Investigator program, All the Strong Lenses in Roman HLWAS, involving Tansu Daylan and Bryce Wedig will help prepare astronomers for the telescope's first observations, building on and extending the work done as part of the Wide Field Science (WFS) program led by Daylan.

Undergraduates showcase summer research

Physics held a Summer Undergraduate Research Poster Session on August 6, giving undergraduate researchers an opportunity to present their summer research and discuss their work with faculty, mentors and fellow students. Several students conducting summer research with MCSS fellows presented their projects at the session.

Scene from the undergraduate poster session

MCSS Fellows in the News

The Frigid Frontier
William McKinnon | Sky & Telescope
Available through WashU Libraries

Recent Publications by McDonnell Center Fellows

Klimczak, Byrne, P. K., et al. (2026). Mercury’s tectonics record a damage zone from the Caloris Basin‐Forming impact. Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, 131(7).

John, P., Sobotka, L., et al. (2026). CompactDAQ: Compact Data Acquisition for Pulse-Shape Discrimination. In GLSVLSI 2026: Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2026 (pp. 862–869).

Katz, J. I. (2026b). Searching for periodicity in FRB 20240114A. The Open Journal of Astrophysics, 9.

Yıldız, M., Daylan, T. , et al.(2026). Planetary systems in the light of asteroseismology: metallicity threshold for the planetary systems and age–metallicity relation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 550(4).

Darafsheh, A., Sobotka, L. G., et al. (2026). Optimizing a commercial small animal irradiator for high dose-rate irradiation studies. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 71(15), 155008.

Upcoming Events

X-Ray Astronomy in Living Color

St. Louis Astronomical Society August Meeting
Mike Nowak, WashU
Friday, August 21
7:30pm, McDonnell 162

View Event

Subscribe to the MCSS Messenger

Did someone forward this MCSS Messenger to you? Would you like to be added to the email list?

Subscribe Now

McDonnell Center Contacts

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

Compiled and edited by Alison Verbeck. Have news to share? Please send it along!

Connect with Us

Manage your mailing preferences | Opt out using TrueRemove®.

Subscribe to our email list.