The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is pleased to announce the 2021 recipients of the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize. The three winners were selected from among 74 Harvard College seniors awarded the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this year.

Hoopes Prize recipients are recognized for their exceptional undergraduate projects. The work of the Fay Prize winners are drawn from this group and are, in the opinion of a selection committee made up of senior Harvard Faculty members, the most outstanding imaginative works or pieces of original research...

Ellen Price, a doctoral student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has been awarded the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship from the Heising-Simons Foundation. Price is one of only eight students in the nation to receive this prestigious award.

The fellowship will provide up to $375,000 in support for Price to conduct independent research in planetary astronomy over the next three years.

"It honestly still feels a bit unreal to be awarded this fellowship," Price says. "But I'm eternally grateful to all the mentors who enabled me to get here, and I'm...

Planets form from the gas and dust in disks that surround young stars. Chemicals in the disk that evaporate easily, called volatiles, include important molecules like water, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, as well as other simple organic molecules. The amount of volatile material that accumulates in a planet as it forms is a key factor in determining the planet's atmosphere and suitability for life, and depends on the details of the gas and ice reservoirs in the disk at the time of planet formation.

CfA astronomers Karin Oberg, Sean Andrews, Jane Huang, Chunhua Qi, and David Wilner...

Title: An ALMA Survey of H2CO in Protoplanetary Disks
Authors: Jamila Pegues, Karin Oberg, J. Bergner et al.
First Author Institution: Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Open access arXiv...