Physicist Andrew Lange passes away at the age of 52.

Astronomers from Caltech and other institutions, using the highly sensitive 10-meter Keck I telescope atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea, have detected an extrasolar planet with a mass just four times that of Earth. The planet, which orbits its parent star HD156668 about once every four days, is the second-smallest world among the more than 400 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system) that have been found to date.

Researchers at the Caltech have proposed a new paradigm that should allow scientists to observe quantum behavior in small mechanical systems. Their ideas, described in the early online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer a new means of addressing one of the most fascinating issues in quantum mechanics: the nature of quantum superposition and entanglement in progressively larger and more complex systems.

F. Brock Fuller, emeritus professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), died on November 6 at the Rafael Convalescent Hospital in San Rafael, California, four years after being diagnosed with diffuse Lewy body disease. He was 82.

An investigation by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration has significantly advanced our understanding of the early evolution of the universe. Analysis of data taken from 2005 to 2007 sets the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang in the gravitational wave frequency band where LIGO can observe. The results put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

Using devices millionths of a meter in size, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a technique to determine the mass of a single molecule, in real time.

Physicists at Caltech have developed a new tool that can be used to search for quantum effects in an ordinary object.

Scientists at Caltech have developed an efficient method to detect entanglement shared among multiple parts of an optical system. They show how entanglement, in the form of beams of light simultaneously propagating along four distinct paths, can be detected with a surprisingly small number of measurements. Entanglement is an essential resource in quantum information science, which is the study of advanced computation and communication based on the laws of quantum mechanics.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) will begin decommissioning the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) in Hawaii. Plans call for the dismantling of the observatory to begin in 2016, with the return of the site to its natural state by 2018.