Space

  1. A false-color image taken with MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) as part of the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) shows a large swath of black space dotted with blue and yellow stars of various brightness. Toward the center of the image, an inset highlights a small cluster of faint spots, revealing where Andromeda XXXV is located.

    Small, faint and ‘unexpected in a lot of different ways’: U-M astronomers make galactic discovery

  2. A collage of three images showing a dusty nebula. The left two-thirds of the collage is taken up by an image of the nebula in visible light. The remaining third is taken up by two other images, one atop the other, in near-infrared. The visible light image has a pillar of dense, dark brown dust running through the nebula at a diagonal from 5 o’clock to 11 o’clock. Wispy plumes appear to fly off from the pillar toward the sides amid blue clouds of the same material, which are whiter near the pillar. There are white stars of different shapes and sizes spread throughout. Two separate, white squares, tilted about 30 degrees, outline two areas in the pillar. The upper square has the letter “A” to the top right, while the lower square is marked by the letter “B”. These labels correspond to the two, magnified images of the region in near-infrared light shown at right, with the top image also labeled “A” and the bottom image labeled “B”. Both images contain a mixture of reds, blues and browns, and show red, blue, and white stars. This collage of images from the Flame Nebula shows a visible light view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the left, while the two insets at the right show the near-infrared view taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Much of the dark, dense gas and dust, as well as the surrounding white clouds within the visible light image, have been cleared in the near-infrared images, giving us a view into a more translucent cloud pierced by the infrared-producing objects within that are young stars and brown dwarfs. Astronomers used Webb to take a census of the lowest-mass objects within this star-forming region. In this image, light at wavelengths of 1.15 microns and 1.4 microns (filters F115W and F140M) is represented in blue, 1.82 microns (F182M) as green, 3.6 microns (F360M) as orange, and 4.3 microns (F430M) as red.

    U-M astronomers peer deeper into mysterious Flame Nebula

  3. A cosmic map shows a weblike structure of galaxies threaded across two panels. On the left, five galaxies are highlighted, with a line between two and a triangle connecting the remaining three. This shows the standard approach of analyzing these maps, by grouping galaxies into pairs or triplets for study. Five galaxies are also highlighted in the right panel, but they are not connected by shapes. Rather the entire panel is divided into a grid of squares, showing the new approach for analyzing these maps.

    Getting the most out of cosmic maps

  4. A graph marks out the six layers of the solar cell, with the organic layer as the third layer down. The proton penetration is shown white on the black background, giving the appearance of a pine tree in a snow storm as the protons trace out a cascade of triangles through all of the solar cell's layers.

    Light, flexible and radiation-resistant: Organic solar cells for space

  5. Meteors streak across a starry sky in the background, behind the white dome of the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope on Iolkam Du’ag, or Kitt Peak.

    New DESI results weigh in on gravity

  6. Evidence mounts for dark energy from black holes

  7. A blue, cloudy planet sits against the dark backdrop of space with a star burning in the background—but still close enough to heat the planet to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit.

    JWST finds first exotic ‘steam world’ shrouded in water vapor 

  8. Artist's rendering shows NASA's Europa mission spacecraft, which is being developed for a launch sometime in the 2020s. This view shows the spacecraft configuration, which could change before launch, as of early 2016. Image credit: NASA

    Europa Clipper: U-M experts available to comment

  9. A small black circle sits at the center of an illustration, representing a black hole. A thin blue spiral shows energetic material swirling around the black hole. The edge of the spiral gives way to a larger, thicker and more diffuse and broader red and orange cloud. Shooting up from the black hole, perpendicular to the cloud, is a narrow jet of radiation shown in bluish white.

    First data from XRISM space mission provides new perspective on supermassive black holes

  10. A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the center, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colors show clouds that glow in infrared light.

    In six new rogue worlds, Webb Telescope finds more star birth clues

  11. Concept illustration of a comet floating in space. Image credit: Nicole Smith, made with Midjourney

    The origins of dark comets

  12. Temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b may be a world completely covered in ice (left) similar to Jupiter’s moon Europa or be an ice world with a liquid substellar ocean and a cloudy atmosphere (centre). LHS 1140 b is 1.7 times the size of our planet Earth (right) and is the most promising habitable zone exoplanet yet in our search for liquid water beyond the Solar System. Image credit: B. Gougeon/Université de Montréal

    Astronomers find surprising ice world in the habitable zone with JWST data

  13. The high-resolution ELT instrument ANDES (formerly known as HIRES), will allow astronomers to study astronomical objects that require highly sensitive observations. It will be used to search for signs of life in Earth-like exoplanets, find the first stars born in the Universe, test for possible variations of the fundamental constants of physics, and measure the acceleration of the Universe's expansion. Image credit: ESO

    U-M part of consortium to design, construct powerful new instrument to unlock universe’s secrets

  14. Concept illustration of solar eruptions. Image credit: Nicole Smith, made with Midjourney

    Weekend geomagnetic storm: Experts can discuss potential US impacts

  15. DESI has made the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Earth is at the center of this thin slice of the full map. In the magnified section, it is easy to see the underlying structure of matter in our universe. Image credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration; custom colormap package by cmastro

    The most precise measurement of our expanding universe

  16. A total solar eclipse combined with stars and some clouds. Image credit: iStock

    Total eclipse: U-M experts leap at rare chance to view sun’s atmosphere from the ground

  17. This artist’s impression shows the formation of a gas giant planet embedded in the disk of dust and gas in the ring of dust around a young star. A University of Michigan study, led by U-M astronomer Gabriele Cugno, aimed the James Webb Space Telescope at a protoplanetary disk surrounding a protostar called SAO 206462, hoping to find a gas giant planet in the act of forming. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada

    U-M astronomers conduct first search for forming planets with new space telescope

  18. On the left are three yellow half-rings, which show how the shape of the circumstellar gas cloud changes as it expands with time. At first, shown in the innermost ring, the gas cloud is a simple torus (a 3D ring). Later, shown in the middle ring, 16 lumps of equal size are beginning to form, like a string of beads. Finally, shown in the outermost ring, the 16 lumps become distinct clumps. A flattened gas cloud extends from the line of clumps. The right side shows vortices, or regions of rapidly rotating flow. At first, there is no rotation in the flow, and so there are no vortices. The first blue ring therefore aligns with the beaded string on the left (the middle yellow half-ring). Sixteen arcs align with the 16 beads on the mirrored side. The arcs then pinch off into isolated vortex loops, which correspond to the clumps on the mirrored side. The simulation shows the shape of the gas cloud on the left and the vortices, or regions of rapidly rotating flow, on the right. Each ring represents a later time in the evolution of the cloud. It shows how a gas cloud that starts as an even ring with no rotation becomes a lumpy ring as the vortices develop. Eventually the gas breaks up into distinct clumps. Credit: Michael Wadas, Scientific Computing and Flow Laboratory

    Explaining a supernova’s ‘string of pearls’

  19. Shadows cast by the leaves of a tree show the central phase of the annular eclipse in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, on Oct. 14, 2023. The space between leaves acts as a natural pinhole projector to safely view the progress of an eclipse. Image credit: David Gerdes

    U-M astronomer: Get to the path of April’s total solar eclipse

  20. This artist impression shows ultra-fast winds blasting out from the center of galaxy Markarian 817. These winds, moving at many millions of kilometers per hour, clear out interstellar gas from a vast region of space. Without this gas, the galaxy can’t form new stars and the black hole in the galactic center has little left to eat. Image credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)

    U-M, XMM-Newton spot a black hole giving ‘fierce feedback’