Stories on space

  1. Traces of water, temperature variations confirmed in super-hot gas giant’s atmosphere

  2. Artist impression of a young planet-forming disk illustrating the respective locations of the soot and water-ice lines. Planets born interior to the soot line will be silicate-rich. Planets born interior to the water-ice line, but exterior to the soot line will be silicate and soot-rich (“Sooty Worlds”). Planets born exterior to the water-ice line will be water worlds. Image credit: Ari Gea/SayoStudio.

    The search for habitable planets expands

  3. U-M graduate student Isaac Malsky, a co-author of the study, ran three-dimensional models for the planet, testing models with and without clouds and hazes, to see how these aerosols shape the thermal structure of the planet and help interpret the data. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

    Researchers measure the light emitted by a sub-Neptune planet’s atmosphere for the first time

  4. The rocky exoplanet GJ 486 b moves in front of its star, a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the universe. Astronomers detected a water vapor signal coming from either the planet or its star, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

    JWST sees water vapor near a distant planet—but is it in the planet’s atmosphere or its star?

  5. Two images taken one month apart of the inner region of a planet-forming disk. The images show unexpected moving structures in the disk around the young, massive star called V1295 Aquilae, and confirm mysterious inner emissions reported in previous studies. Image credit: Michigan Astronomy

    Study presents most detailed image of inner region of planet forming disks

  6. Yukun Sun, a graduate student research assistant, and William Leal, a research assistant, both in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan, work together to set up an experiment where microplastic pellets are placed on the surface of the water in the wind wave tank at the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory to determine how they effect measurements of surface roughness on June 18, 2021.

    Tracking ocean microplastics from space

  7. This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, containing about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass. Hubble cannot see the dark matter directly. Astronomers inferred its location by analyzing the effect of gravitational lensing, where light from galaxies behind Abell 1689 is distorted by intervening matter within the cluster. Researchers used the observed positions of 135 lensed images of 42 background galaxies to calculate the location and amount of dark matter in the cluster. They superimposed a map of these inferred dark matter concentrations, tinted blue, on an image of the cluster taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. If the cluster's gravity came only from the visible galaxies, the lensing distortions would be much weaker. The map reveals that the densest concentration of dark matter is in the cluster's core. Abell 1689 resides 2.2 billion light-years from Earth. The image was taken in June 2002. Image credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

    A new model for dark matter

  8. Interstellar clouds of gas and dust contract, flatten and spin up while they do so. A star is finally born in the centre; planets may form from the disc of leftover material. Image credit: Bill Saxton/NRAO/AUI/NSF

    Shift to ultraviolet-driven chemistry in planet-forming disks marks beginning of late-stage planet formation

  9. Concept illustration of a spacecraft. Image courtesy: Michigan Engineering

    Cyber vulnerability in networks used by spacecraft, aircraft and energy generation systems

  10. Nadab Wubshet, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, stands near the launch site, holding up a microfluidic chip like those sent to the International Space Station Monday. Image credit: Samuel Chen

    Gravity’s impact on bone cells—experiments heading to the International Space Station

  11. The inner region of the Orion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument. Photo credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Data reduction and analysis : PDRs4All ERS Team; graphical processing S. Fuenmayor

    First JWST images of Orion Nebula released

  12. At Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, the James Webb Space Telescope will soon be encapsulated inside this 17 meter-high, 5.4-meter diameter fairing, which will provide protection from the thermal, acoustic and aerodynamic stresses during the ascent to space. Image credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace

    NASA releases first images from Webb telescope: U-M experts available

  13. A team led by University of Michigan postdoctoral researcher Evan Rich and professor John Monnier imaged 44 targets in a survey called Gemini-Large Imaging with GPI Herbig/T-tauri Survey, or Gemini-LIGHTS. The astronomers detected some form of dust around 80% of the 44 targets. The team released a gallery of 6 of the 44 targets showing a range of different morphologies that tell the researchers about the dynamics happening within the disk itself. Rich will present the summary paper's findings at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting this month. His study has also been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Image credit: Credit: Evan Rich, University of Michigan

    To find a planet, look for the signatures of planet formation

  14. M94 is a spiral galaxy located 16 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. University of Michigan doctoral student Katya Gozman investigated the galaxy's halo to examine the galaxy's merger history. Image credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA

    The quiet life of Messier 94

  15. A new satellite galaxy in the Messier 81 group. With only 100,000 stars, this is the faintest known member of the Messier 81 group and is one of the very faintest galaxies discovered outside the Milky Way’s immediate environment. Image credit: Eric Bell, University of Michigan, with the Subaru Telescope

    What faint dwarf galaxies can tell astronomers about galaxy formation

  16. The star HD 222925 is a ninth-magnitude star located toward the southern constellation Tucana. Image credit: The STScI Digitized Sky Survey

    Astronomers find ‘gold standard’ star in Milky Way

  17. The NASA visualization team created a superposition of an image of the Milky Way, taken by the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, and a visualization of the simulations of the eRosita and Fermi bubbles prepared by Karen Yang (lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan) in cooperation with the co-authors of the paper Mateusz Ruszkowski (University of Michigan) and Ellen Zweibel (University of Wisconsin). Image credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

    Massive bubbles at center of Milky Way caused by supermassive black hole

  18. A team of researchers has discovered a pair of black holes orbiting each other 13 billion light-years away. The smaller black hole is in the foreground, and the more massive black hole, with a jet emanating from it and pointed at Earth, is in the background. Image credit: R. Hurt (IPAC)/Caltech

    Colossal black holes locked in dance at heart of galaxy

  19. Enrico Rinaldi, research scientist in the University of Michigan Department of Physics, is using two simulation methods to solve quantum matrix models which can describe what the gravity of a black hole looks like. In this image, a pictorial representation of curved space time connects the two simulation methods. On the bottom, a deep learning method is represented by graphs of points (neural network), while the quantum circuit method on top is represented by lines, squares and circles (qubits and gates). The simulation methods merge with each side of the curved space time to represent the fact that gravity properties come out of the simulations. Rinaldi is based in Tokyo and hosted by the Theoretical Quantum Physics Laboratory at the Cluster for Pioneering Research at RIKEN, Wako. Image credit: Enrico Rinaldi/U-M, RIKEN and A. Silvestri.

    What’s inside a black hole? U-M physicist uses quantum computing, machine learning to find out

  20. Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument creates largest 3D map of the cosmos