Carnegie Science

09/04/2026

Object 21: Beneath the Carnegie Observatories’ historic Pasadena building, two ruling engines and the diffraction gratings they produced offer a glimpse into the precision engineering that helped make 20th-century astrophysics possible.

08/26/2026

🖖 This just in! Philip Plait—astronomer, author, and "The Bad Astronomer"—will be moderating the panel at our upcoming celebrating sixty years of Star Trek!

Free and open to the public. RSVP required: bit.ly/3SsjCRO.

Boldly go where no Carnegie Science Neighborhood Lecture has gone before as we explore the science of Star Trek. Free and open to the public. Registration required.

08/20/2026

Set phasers to science! On Sept. 9—the day after Star Trek turns 60—Carnegie astrobiologist Mike Wong will give a special to celebrate the show's anniversary. A Star Trek podcaster in his free time, he'll hold the franchise's imagined worlds up against the real exoplanets we're finding now. What did the writers get right? What did they get wrong? You'll have to come along for the ride to find out!

A selection of Carnegie scientists will join Wong on the stage to share how their own work intersects with the Trek universe. The talk will be followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A.

🖖 Wednesday, Sept. 9
📍 Greenewalt Auditorium, Broad Branch Road campus, NW DC
🕕 Doors 6 p.m., talk 6:30 p.m.
🎟️ This lecture is free and open to the public. We have finite auditorium space, so please RSVP early—bit.ly/4gH7wNH

08/14/2026

🚐🌵 In the 1970s, Carnegie scientists drove a mobile home into Death Valley.

08/07/2026

🌐 🚩 We're flying high with Object 19! Carried over oceans, across continents, and even into space, our expedition flag tells the story of an institution dedicated to exploration.

08/06/2026

Last week, Carnegie President John Mulchaey and author George Hammond joined Commonwealth Club World Affairs in San Francisco for a conversation spanning Carnegie’s role in astronomy history, next-generation telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope, and the future of astronomy in the United States.

Thank you to Commonwealth Club World Affairs and Wonderfest for hosting this timely conversation! 🔭✨

More in the comments. 👇

07/23/2026

Happy birthday to the "Mother of Dark Matter," Vera Rubin, born on this day in 1928.

In our Solar System, the farther out you go, the slower you orbit—Mercury moves about 47 kilometers per second, Neptune about 5. Astronomers expected galaxies to work the same way, with stars slowing down toward the edges.

Working at Carnegie Science in the 1960s, Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast stars orbit in the Andromeda galaxy and found something else entirely. Stars near the center were moving at roughly 250 kilometers per second—and stars tens of thousands of light-years farther out were still moving at roughly 250 kilometers per second. The curve went flat instead of falling.

The only explanation was mass astronomers couldn't see, far more of it than the visible galaxy accounted for. Rubin went on to find the same flat curve in dozens of other galaxies.

The galaxy in our special birthday logo is based on Andromeda, where she first observed the phenomenon.

Learn more about Vera Rubin and the case for dark matter: bit.ly/3Thw4DZ

07/21/2026

Happy birthday to Robert S. Woodward, Carnegie's second president and the man historians have called "the first modern manager of science." His portrait is Object 18 in our series.

When Woodward took office in 1904, no one had settled a basic question: what should a research institution actually be? Andrew Carnegie had supplied the money and the mission but left the blueprint blank. Woodward spent 16 years drawing it—trading scattered grants for long-term support of proven investigators (among them future Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan) and building up Carnegie's own departments into what he called "a university in which there are no students."

The results spoke for themselves. Impressed by the institution's growth, Andrew Carnegie doubled his endowment, adding $2 million in 1907 and $10 million in 1911. The philosophy Woodward set—proven investigators and mission-driven departments over scattered grants—still guides Carnegie Science today.

Learn more: bit.ly/4yDEeXu

07/20/2026

We've got another cool find from our archives! 🔭

Before we could build telescopes, someone had to find the mountain! By the early 1960s, Carnegie Science was already a force in astronomy through Mount Wilson—but being in the north meant the southern skies were out of reach. So the institution went looking for a mountain in the Southern Hemisphere: somewhere remote, high, and dry enough to see clearly to the edge of what telescopes could reach.

The search took most of the decade. In 1966, astronomers landed on a promising peak in the Chilean Andes, above the high Atacama Desert: Las Campanas. Over the next two years, the site kept proving itself, with some of the clearest, driest, darkest skies on Earth.

These field photographs come from one of the last scouting trips, in November 1968. They show the Carnegie Southern Observatory team—project supervisor Donald Buck and administrator Bruce Adkison among them—walking the ridgelines and checking the water supplies, judging whether we could sustain an observatory all the way up there.

Spoiler: it definitely could. Days later, Observatories Director Horace Babcock met with Chilean President Eduardo Frei to secure the land, and Carnegie finalized the purchase of 50,000 acres in July 1969. The first telescope—Swope—rose by 1971.

And we haven't stopped. The du Pont telescope followed in 1977, the twin Magellan telescopes on Manqui peak in 2000 and 2002, the Local Volume Mapper in 2023, and the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is underway now.

These photos are Object 17 in our series. Read the full story 👇
bit.ly/44EpSsc

07/20/2026

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and the samples the crew carried home have been changing how we understand our Moon and Solar System for decades. They showed us that planets are born hot and violent, that the Moon's dark basins are impact scars rather than ancient seas, and —thanks to work by the late Carnegie geochemist Erik Hauri—that the Moon isn't the bone-dry world we long assumed.

Fifty-seven years later, Carnegie scientists are still finding new answers in those rocks. 🌑 Here are three things we learned from Apollo: bit.ly/4fIv3xk