CU-Boulder researchers have made a large number of astronomy and space discoveries in recent years that have impacted the nation and world. Following is a list of some -- but certainly not all -- of the major accomplishments faculty and students have achieved in recent years.
* CU scientists have made a number of exciting discoveries of Jupiter's system using two UV spectrometers, including the discovery of oxygen at the surfaces of two of Jupiter聮s moons, Ganymede and Callisto. The instruments also continue to monitor the hot gases being emitted on large volcanoes on Io, another of Jupiter聮s moons, as well as a doughnut-shaped ring of charged particles surrounding Jupiter that glows with the amount of energy equal to all the power generated on Earth.
* Since Hubble was launched, CU researchers have acquired important images and made new discoveries. They took the first Hubble images of Venus and the sharpest images ever taken of Mars. They also used Hubble to observe the growth of dust particles in discs around three nearby stars, a phenomenon that appears to be a missing link between space dust and planet formation.
* Several shuttle experiments flown by BioServe in October 1998 have shown promise for developing new biomedical products. One antibiotic production experiment involving microbes showed the production of the antibiotic actinomycin D was 75 percent higher in space than in ground-control experiments.
* Discovered a new ring around Saturn known as the "F" ring using data from the Voyager 2 satellite. Also used data from the Pioneer Venus satellite to discover evidence for a massive volcanic eruption on Venus in the early 1980s that was hundreds of times as powerful as the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington.
* Used a CU-built $9 million spectrograph on NASA聮s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE, to discover that molecular hydrogen -- the primary ingredient for star and planet formation -- is found nearly everywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. The molecular hydrogen, or H2, condenses into dark, star-forming clouds in interstellar space.
* Pinpointed a series of previously unknown Paleo-Indian quarries in Montana dating back as far as 10,000 years using satellite images, aerial photographs and ground-based geophysics to locate ancient Indian mining pits. The quarries were used by ancient North Americans to obtain a quartz-like material for tool making.
* Used satellite data to observe a rare space weather event in May 1999 known as "The Day the Solar Wind Ran Out of Gas." On May 11, the solar wind density was only about 2 percent of normal, and the wind聮s speed dropped by more than half. This caused the pressure on the magnetic field to plummet by more than 99 percent, causing Earth's magnetosphere to balloon to more than 100 times its normal volume, reaching nearly to the moon in an event seen only a few times in history.
* Detected large crustal deformation and extreme stress in the tectonic plates underlying the Himalayan Mountains through GPS satellite technology, allowing for improved earthquake forecasting in the region that could potentially save thousands of lives.
* Discovered changes in the rotation rates of violent, charged gases some 130,000 miles beneath the sun聮s surface known as the "solar dynamo," a finding that may help scientists better understand the 11-year solar cycle that affects Earth. Space and ground-based observatories showed significant speed-ups and slow-downs in the rotation rate of gases at the inner edge of the convection zone, just above where the solar dynamo that builds and regulates the magnetic field of the sun is located. This is the first time scientists have been able to measure changes in the heart of the solar dynamo.
* Predicted that Supernova 1987A would begin brightening again as a rapidly expanding debris cloud from the original explosion slammed into an enormous ring of hydrogen gas encircling the dying star. Estimated to be roughly 6 trillion miles in diameter, the gas ring is believed to have formed from material expelled by the star before it shrank from a red supergiant into a blue supergiant some 20,000 years before exploding. The rapidly brightening ring could brighten by a factor of 1,000 in the visible portion of the light spectrum during the coming decade.
* Computer models indicated a rogue planet three times as massive as Mars probably sideswiped Earth 4.5 billion years ago, vaporizing enough material from Earth聮s upper layers to form the moon. Portions of Earth聮s crust blown off by the collision likely accreted into the moon we see today, perhaps in less than a century.
* Peering deep into a distant galaxy, obtained a glimpse of what may be the youngest massive star clusters ever observed. The discovery provides astronomers with a look inside stellar nurseries at massive clusters of stars in their infancy. Estimated to be only about 500,000 years old, the star clusters are in the very earliest stages of development, analogous to the first day of life of a human.
* Successfully predicted in 1994 that silvery-blue ice clouds known as noctilucent clouds that appear each year in the far northern and southern latitudes in the middle atmosphere would brighten and become visible over the continental United States by the 21st century. Spotted over Colorado in 1999, the clouds are thought to form from increases in rising methane that reacts with sunlight to form large quantities of water vapor that eventually freeze and circulate to the top of the atmosphere.
* Telescope observations show that several young stars near the Orion Nebula have been stripped of the gas and dust surrounding them by radiation from massive stars nearby, revealing supersonic jets of gas shooting from the now-naked objects. The observation team concluded that ultraviolet radiation from several nearby massive stars destroyed the cocoons of gas and dust surrounding nearby young stars. The destruction has made gaseous jets from the young stars -- billions of miles long and traveling at about 300 miles per second -- visible in their entirety for the first time.