June 2025

If you didn’t have a chance to meet Helen Cui, the winner of this year’s Project Green Light $5000 award, at the May Class Committee meeting, please take a few minutes to be inspired. Project Green Light was developed by the Class of 1968 Arts Legacy Committee in conjunction with Dartmouth’s Dean of the Arts and Sciences.

Scroll down to learn more about this month's featured image from the James Webb Space Telescope and to see more site updates.

Click on the image to enlarge

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the clearest look yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The observations detected carbon dioxide in each of the planets, which provides strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets formed much like Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building solid cores that attract gas from within a protoplanetary disk. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by a coronagraph. The colors in this image, which represent different wavelengths captured by Webb’s NIRCam, tell researchers about the temperatures and composition of the planets. HR 8799 b, which orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, is the coldest of the bunch, and the richest in carbon dioxide. HR 8799 e orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, and likely formed closer to the host star, where there were stronger variations in the composition of material. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light.

The featured images on this and other site update pages are taken from the James Webb Telescope images page. Click here to see many more images on the Webb Space Telescope page.

Recent Site Updates

August 2025

Topics Updated

Obituary

Click here to open the monthly update details page. On the details page you will also have access to all monthly updates back to January 2023.

July 2025

Topics Updated

Meeting Minutes, Obituary

Click here to open the monthly update details page. On the details page you will also have access to all monthly updates back to January 2023.