Researchers used data from The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) to measure the amount of helium — the second-most common element in the cosmos and a vital ingredient for the formation of life — in metal-poor nebulas, clouds of gas and dust in space where stars are sometimes born. Their findings strengthen long-held theories about how ancient elements, such as carbon and nitrogen, may have been dispersed in the period following the Big Bang.

Astronomers did this by analyzing helium signals in optical and infrared light to determine the temperature and density of the gases within faraway systems. After collecting 48 high-quality galactic samples, the team created a dataset aimed at significantly expanding researchers’ ability to infer the universe’s primordial helium abundance.

“Everything that we need to live here on Earth was once fused inside of a star,” said Miqaela Weller, lead author of the study and a PhD student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “Understanding precisely where those elements come from helps inform us of how our universe evolved and how it will evolve in the future.”

The study was recently published as part of a series of papers in The Astrophysical Journal.

The work was completed as part of the LBT Yp project, a collaboration designed to accurately determine how much primordial helium was created at the universe’s beginning, an amount theorized to be largely dependent on the types of neutrinos, tiny and abundant subatomic particles, that were likely formed when the universe was only a second old.

If, for example, the amount of helium found in metal-poor galaxies is vastly different from astronomers’ current predictions, their results might challenge current theories about the universe’s early conditions as well as open the door to new, undiscovered physics, said Weller, who leads the infrared data reduction for the project

Still, it can be extremely difficult to peer into the universe’s past, as astronomers can only see up to about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, or when the universe became transparent enough to form the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Thus, by comparing their new observations with archival ones of the CMB, they can determine if current models of the universe are accurate.

“The importance of galactic archaeology cannot be understated,” said Weller. “The stars are within us, and learning more about them helps us determine our place within the universe.”

Roughly 90% of the universe’s helium formed during the Big Bang, with 10% originating from stars that have undergone nuclear fusion over the last 13.5 billion years. While researchers had previously only been able to estimate the universe’s helium abundance to a precision of about 2%, this work reduces that error to almost half a percent, a development that amounts to a huge leap in computational astrophysics, said Richard Pogge, a founding member of the project and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State.

“By making this exciting measurement, we’ve learned something fundamental about the universe,” said Pogge.

Scientists have theorized that all the raw materials of the universe emerged in the first few moments after its birth, including neutrinos. Until this paper’s result, it had been unclear whether the many subatomic particles that drive our modern grasp of particle physics appeared simultaneously or arrived later in an alternative, sequential way.

In searching for the answer, the team was challenged to locate extremely rare metal-poor galaxies, such as the tiny Leo P, as well as account for how Earth’s atmosphere could affect their data. Ultimately, their research confirmed that the number of neutrino species present at the Big Bang is, in fact, consistent with the standard model of particle physics, said Pogge.

“Finally having atomic data precise enough to show how the universe worked seconds after it began gives us the ability to make meaningful constraints on the nature of physics itself,” he said.

According to the team, the LBT Yp project plans to continue deciphering cosmic mysteries by constraining less-explored parameters of undiscovered metal-poor galaxies, likely with the aid of vast astronomical archives of collaboration projects like DESI.

“It’s going to take us many years to try to explore new galaxies and turn the techniques we’ve developed onto them,” Pogge said. “So it’s an enormous pleasure to be able to pass these decades-long findings onto those who are going to be the future of this field.”

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Jayde Spiegel as well as Evan Skillman and John H. Miller Jr. from the University of Minnesota, Erik Aver from Gonzaga University, Noah Rogers from Northwestern University, Danielle Berg from The University of Texas at Austin, and John Salzar from Indiana University. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and Ohio State’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics.

Using computational modeling to simulate how electrons interact with manganese ions — an element produced during stellar explosions called supernovae — researchers predicted how different environmental conditions could produce types of observable light called emission lines.

They found that certain emission lines were extremely sensitive to changes in the temperature and density of the surrounding nebula, meaning they could be useful tools for analyzing rapidly expanding objects like supernova remnants and other large gas clouds, said Anil Pradhan, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“If we understand the chemical composition of galaxies, we can learn more about the chemistry of stars and their elements,” said Pradhan. “That will eventually lead to understanding the evolution of the universe and the composition of everything within it.”

The study was recently published in The Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.

Stellar explosions play a crucial role in the formation of heavy elements like iron and other metals, which are essential to the evolution of stars, planets and other cosmic objects. Manganese is a key element because its abundance increases over time, meaning that researchers can use it as a cosmological clock to learn more about how galaxies evolve.

“Space and time are related, so measuring manganese abundances can grant us insight into the ever-expanding nature of the universe,” said Pradhan. “By combining this emission line data with other known facts on important elements like oxygen and sulfur, we may be able to view some of the earliest observable epochs in the history of the universe.”

Still, depending on their strength, faint emission lines can be extremely difficult and time-consuming to detect. To overcome these limitations, Pradhan and his colleagues employed powerful computing systems to model the behavior of more than 700 potential emission lines using atomic physics calculations that would otherwise have taken years to complete.

Though their work is still theoretical, the findings suggest that once paired with real-life astronomical observations, these conclusions could even be used to predict the conditions of other types of complex space environments, said Pradhan. Moreover, understanding manganese’s role in the cosmos could help scientists predict the universe’s chemical future.

“We’re getting better and better at capturing energy that reveals the shape of the universe,” said Pradhan. “This work joins astrophysics, atomic physics and plasma physics together, and we’re on the cusp of discovering many brand new processes.”

The team plans to verify their data using the James Webb Space Telescope and other ground-based observatories specialized in detecting chemical variations across time and space. The results from this work will also be made publicly available so that researchers can compare their datasets with novel atomic analyses, laying the foundation for similar chemical discoveries.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and partially carried out at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Co-authors include Sultana Nahar from Ohio State and first author Zher Samak from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Palestine.

Once NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this week, the mission is expected to explore the cosmos by surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies, capturing the sky in detail hundreds of times faster than even the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” said David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. “These better measurements may end up teaching us something extremely revolutionary about all kinds of matter in the cosmos.”

More than two dozen Ohio State faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars have played a role in designing Roman’s surveys, including the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, a portion of the mission aimed at probing the structure and expansion of the universe as it evolved through cosmic time. Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State who helped calibrate Roman’s image detectors, said that mission success can be attributed to decades of human ingenuity and perseverance.

“With Roman, we'll be seeing some things for the first time, as well as revisiting places we've seen before but with an increased level of resolution,” said Harbo Torres. “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.”

The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey aspect of the program plans to utilize the telescope to peer past the plane of the Milky Way to map about 12% of the sky in just under two years. In all, Roman's surveys will detect about a billion galaxies and 20 billion stars, more astronomical objects than have ever been detected by all of humanity’s telescopes put together, said Weinberg.

“For just one single point, displaying an image from this telescope would be like looking at a wall full of 4K televisions,” he said. “These will have an extraordinary image quality as it scans the sky for objects more than 100 million times too faint to see with the human eye.”

This preciseness is one that typically eludes scientists when trying to look through our planet’s blurring atmosphere, Weinberg said. Over the course of several months, Roman will settle into orbit at Lagrange point two (L2), a gravitationally stable point about a million miles away from Earth.

The Roman mission revolves around three core science themes — measuring dark energy, investigating exoplanets, and expanding the study of astrophysics and planetary science. Astronomers will use the data Roman sends back to study dark matter, an invisible substance that can only be perceived by its gravitational effect on other objects, as well as dark energy, a force that seems to have a hand in speeding up the universe’s expansion. Understanding these aspects can also offer insights into local galactic history and evolution.

“Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” said Weinberg. “Ohio State is part of the teams that are building the tools to actually do that advanced analysis.”

But just getting a better lay of the land isn’t Roman’s end goal. Creating a more detailed sketch of the cosmos will help scientists answer critical questions about the inner workings of the universe, such as whether stellar systems like ours are rare and how many black holes there may be in the Milky Way, and extend the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

“Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” said Scott Gaudi, the principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.”

Compared to legacy instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will map the sky about 1,000 times faster than its predecessor, a process made more efficient by its wide field-of-view, said Gaudi. Using a planet-hunting method called microlensing in tandem with the traditional transiting technique, researchers expect Roman will detect around 100,000 worlds, ideally expanding NASA’s exoplanet catalog to new heights.

Although Roman is currently slated as a five-year mission, researchers hope the data it uncovers, along with the lifespan of its sturdy science instruments, allows the mission to continue operating for decades to come. “Even though Ohio State has a large footprint on the mission, we don’t even begin to cover a fraction of the kind of science that can and will be done with Roman,” said Gaudi. “Our job so far has been to make sure it’s successful.”

The telescope’s first science findings are expected in mid-2027, but in the meantime, groups like the Roman Science Collaboration, of which Weinberg is a leading member, are looking forward to seeing how returns from this mission inform the next generation of astronomical priorities.

“The value of producing really big, vital datasets is that you then enable anyone in the world to go and make discoveries with it,” said Weinberg. “That’s a really powerful way of doing science, and I think bringing that to space-based astronomy is very inspiring.”

To celebrate their role in the achievement, as many as 20 members of the Ohio State cohort plan to be present on the beach when Roman lifts off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This includes Christopher Hirata, another key member of Ohio State’s Roman science team and a professor of physics at Ohio State, who notes that as large data sets and machine learning algorithms become indispensable for studying the universe’s most fundamental parts, this mission is primed to reshape how future researchers interact with exciting new science tools.

“Roman’s technology will have a huge influence on the future of space science,” said Hirata. “From launch onward, it’s going to be spectacular.”

Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxy they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on studying how an object’s strong gravity bends light around its host galaxy. Yet despite their own powerful gravity, finding quasars that can act as lenses is uncommon.

Moreover, while nearly every galaxy is home to a black hole, research suggests those that form quasars may act as “missing links” into the formation and evolution of the early universe. Young ones, especially, could be key to unlocking vast cosmic secrets.

Now, to identify more quasars as gravitational lenses, researchers analyzed a list of 800,000 quasars from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. Then, using an AI model trained on a small sample of mock lenses, or fake examples of quasar lens systems, to automatically search for these rare events, researchers found seven new candidates.

“Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole,” said Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important.”

These new candidates double the number of quasars scientists have found by surveys in years past, and with more data, the discovery offers an opportunity to expand our knowledge of how their systems work as well as how the galaxy they reside in grows and evolves.

For instance, while the seven candidates in this study are located at least 5 to 6 billion light-years away from Earth, uncovering new insights about these faraway objects could also reveal valuable information about our own galaxy, said McArthur.

“By studying the tight correlation between galaxies and black holes, we could understand why our galaxy is the way that it is and perhaps why our own black hole is sometimes dormant,” he said.

The study was published July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Outside of the team’s observations, what is unique about its work is the use of neural networks to achieve its result. Since there aren’t enough real-life examples of quasars acting as lenses, researchers had to teach their AI to identify the emission lines of potential quasars as gravitational lenses using a mixture of real quasar and background galaxy spectra.

This method created a simulation so impressive that the AI was able to recognize the subtle differences between normal and abnormal quasars with unique features, said McArthur.

“What this proves is our architecture was able to parse through a diverse array of quasar spectra in a really significant way,” said McArthur.

After whittling DESI’s list of 800,000 potential quasars to 200, the team hand-reviewed the shortened list before narrowing down the candidates to a final seven.

Going forward, the researchers will seek to directly confirm their observations using powerful space-based instruments like the Hubble Telescope. Once those deeper studies are completed, with more data, they expect to use their AI model to help future scientists search for and validate other kinds of strange cosmic phenomena.

“You can very well expand this type of study to find many rare anomalies in a spectrum,” said McArthur. “We’re in an era when science has suddenly become more accessible than ever, and applying AI to astronomy and machine learning methods to big data sets is part of that.”

Other co-authors from Ohio State are Klaus Honscheid and Claire Lamman. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program.

Researchers analyzed about 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies using data from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, whose observations were made as part of the PHANGS survey — a collaboration aimed at better understanding galactic evolution. 

They found that in normal galaxies, pressure from ionized gas drives the expansion of young star-forming regions. However, whether these zones continue to grow or remain stagnant is strongly dependent on their surrounding environment, said Debosmita Pathak, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“When young massive stars are born, they’re very energetic and pump out a ton of photons into their surroundings,” said Pathak. “In that process, they disrupt their local environments and start to drive interstellar material out of the area.”

This mechanism, called stellar feedback, can influence galactic activity across many scales.   Altering the evolution of dusty, cold gas in areas that are ripe for stellar birth can either trigger star formation or lead to the destruction of these star-forming regions. 

Such changes can also drive the chemical evolution of a galaxy, as chemical properties play a crucial role in both planet formation and in recording galactic history, said Pathak. 

“The Milky Way, for example, forms roughly one star per year, while more luminous infrared galaxies can produce stars at 100 times that rate,” said Pathak. “But galaxies that have an abnormally high amount of stars typically underwent a more violent process to form, such as a major merger, where two galaxies collide.”

The research was presented today (June 17, 2026) in a press conference at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Pasadena, California. The AAS selected the findings to be featured in a press conference. 

To learn more about how young stars behave in these extremely dusty and turbulent environments, researchers compared the young stellar feedback pressures they found in normal star-forming galaxies against that of the incredibly bright starburst system NGC 3256, a pair of massive galaxies located about 100 million light-years from Earth. 

Their results showed that the stellar feedback pressures there are about 100 times stronger than in other Milky Way-like spiral galaxies, meaning that while young, massive star clusters in the densest regions of the galaxy are confined by this intense pressure, most are likely super-powered enough to continue expanding.

Additionally, the high levels of turbulence researchers found in NGC 3256 are an indication that the gas within it is not settled in a simple flat disk, suggesting that the interplay between star formation and the usual conditions that precede it may be more unpredictable than in its normal, relatively stable galactic counterparts.

“These are pressure measurements that we haven’t been able to make before, and they are quite different from what we’ve seen in galaxies similar to the Milky Way,” said Pathak. “This will allow us to benchmark the physical processes driving galactic evolution.” 

The study’s results have direct implications for understanding how star-forming regions evolve across many different cosmic settings, as well as how young stars help regulate and shape galactic evolution, even before high-powered blasts like supernovae can occur.

“It’s important to study environments in normal parts of the universe, but also how things deviate in the extremes,” said Pathak. “Without this type of research, we wouldn’t know if the physics that we’re working with and the models that we’re building actually hold true in such extreme places.”

This summer, alongside the GOALS collaboration, Pathak plans to continue their work measuring star formation in dusty environments as a visiting graduate student at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. In advancing this work, Pathak expects their bright findings to inspire other insights in the scientific community. 

“Events like AAS are great places to get interdisciplinary collaboration work started,” said Pathak. “It’s also nice to see folks who are still interested in learning more about natural sciences, and get the word out that discovery is a very cool and fun thing to do.”

Finished ahead of schedule and armed with vastly more data than expected, researchers plan to use DESI’s map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D construct of the universe ever made, to explore dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that makes up about 70% of the cosmos.

In the five years since DESI began collecting data, the survey has observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million stars, and its results have already revealed much about the structure and evolution of the universe, said Paul Martini, the instrument scientist during DESI construction and commissioning and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“DESI has been a superb international collaboration, and its incredibly fruitful scientific results are a leading example of its impact on the broader scientific community,” he said. 

DESI’s quest to understand dark energy is a global endeavor. The international experiment brings together the expertise of more than 900 researchers (including 300 PhD students) from over 70 institutions and is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Researchers at Ohio State have been crucial partners to some of DESI’s most significant discoveries, from helping analyze the promising first-year results to learning how dark energy continues to evolve in unexpected ways.

“Ohio State made the largest contributions to the instrumentation, operations and analysis infrastructure of any university group in DESI,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at Ohio State. “We are proud of our collaboration’s world-leading results on dark energy, as well as pleased with the substantial, international media attention they have received.”

Amidst the program’s ambitious schedule, the DESI team’s ability to complete the survey in five years was challenged more than once, most notably by the Contras wildfire in 2022, which interrupted power and internet infrastructure in the observatory for months. Fortunately, these disruptions were isolated and fixed quickly, said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and an assistant research professor of physics at Ohio State. 

“By coming up with creative solutions to address unforeseen problems, the high-quality data we collected each night was carefully and confidently used to obtain the exciting cosmological constraints that DESI is now known for,” said Ross. 

Now, with this new completed set of data, scientists will have significantly more information to test long-held hypotheses about the balance between dark energy and matter, and their answers may mark a major shift in how we think about our universe and its potential fate. 

Having measured cosmological data for six times as many galaxies and quasars as all previous measurements combined, the collaboration plans to immediately begin processing their completed dataset in the coming months, with the first dark energy results from DESI’s full five-year survey expected in 2027. 

After completing the original five-year mission, DESI plans to continue observations through 2028. This will include expanding its survey to include parts of the sky that are more challenging to observe: Constructing a more detailed map of the cosmos may also make it easier for scientists to study nearby objects like dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, and grant them the ability to paint a much clearer picture of the universe’s formation and history, said Honscheid. 

But in the meantime, the Ohio State team will continue refining their dark energy measurements by analyzing data gathered during the first three years, and optimize their telescope time and its capabilities to help make exciting new observations. 

“A larger survey footprint will greatly improve our constraints on cosmological parameters and improve our dark matter program,” said Honscheid. “But these achievements are only possible because the operations team worked incredibly hard to keep the survey progressing.”

Other Ohio State contributors to DESI include Matthew Berno, Mikel Charles, Carl Coker, Rebecca Coles, Andrei Cuceu, Xinyi Chen, Mark Derwent, Ann Elliott, Jack Elvin-Poole, Lauren Ennesser, Kevin Fanning, Simon Filbert, Meagan Herbold, Jennifer Johnson, Naim Karacayli, Hui Kong, Claire Lamman, Thomas O’Brien, Daniel Pappalardo, Richard Pogge, Anna Porredon, Michael Rashkovetskyi, Jon Shover, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, David Weinberg, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. 

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions.

The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers melted fake lunar soil – a synthetic version of the fine dusty material on the moon surface, called regolith simulant – into layers and fused it with a base surface to manufacture small, heat-resistant objects. 

If utilized on the lunar surface, the material may help build sturdy, nontoxic habitats and tools for future astronauts, capabilities that would be vital to the NASA Artemis missions that aim to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by the end of the decade.

But to assess how well this new construction material may work in space, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions, revealing that the overall quality of the material depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.  

“By combining different feedstocks, like metal and ceramics, in the printing process, we found that the final material is really sensitive to the environment,” said Sizhe Xu, lead author of the study and a graduate research associate in industrial systems engineering at The Ohio State University. “Different environments lead to different properties, which directly affect the mechanical strength and the thermal shock resistance of certain components.”

The study was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

There are two types of lunar regolith simulants that scientists use to study the surface of the moon. The one this team used, called LHS-1, is designed to replicate soil found in the lunar highlands, a heavily cratered area rife with dark-colored basaltic rock. 

In this case, researchers discovered that while trying to print LHS-1 on stainless steel and glass surfaces was challenging, it adhered well to alumina-silicate ceramic, likely because the two compounds form crystals that enhance thermal stability and mechanical strength. 

Other environmental factors, such as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the strength of the laser and even the speed of the printing process, were also shown to impact the stability of the structure, said Sarah Wolff, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

“There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant,” she said. “It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios.”

Unsurprisingly, developing special systems for prolonged space travel is one of the most challenging aspects of successful human exploration, as technologies created for In-Situ Resource Utilization, or the harnessing of local natural resources at mission destinations, must be engineered to survive extreme vacuum, dust and thermal environmental conditions.

To accomplish this, scientists are rapidly evolving additive manufacturing systems, which would help reduce the need to transport large quantities of materials and heavy equipment from Earth and enable astronauts to create an array of structures, tools and habitats. 

The promise of these technologies would not only save essential mission time but also allow for extended independence as crews travel into deep space. 

Still, more data is needed to overcome any potential limitations future travelers might face as they lift off for other worlds. This study, for example, suggests that instead of being powered by electricity as their printing system is on Earth, future designs of the system could likely be scaled up using solar-driven or other hybrid power architectures. 

“There are so many applications that we’re working toward that with new information, the possibilities are endless,” said Xu. 

This team’s work also extends beyond supporting humanity’s push to the stars, as gaining a better sense of how manufacturing might work in space could help researchers discover new ways to address critical material shortages back home, said Wolff. 

“If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth,” she said. “To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Marwan Haddad, Aslan Bafahm Alamdari, Annabel Shim and Alan Luo. 

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research and the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis. 

Between late 2024 and early 2025, one star in our galaxy, dubbed ASASSN-24fw, dimmed in brightness by about 97%, before brightening again. Since then, scientists have been swapping theories about what was behind this rare, exciting event. 

Now, an international team led by scientists at The Ohio State University may have come up with an answer to the mystery. In a new study recently published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, astronomers suggest that because the color of the star’s light remained unchanged during its dimming, the event wasn’t caused by the star evolving in some way, but by a large cloud of dust and gas around the star that occluded Earth’s view of it. 

“We explored three different scenarios for what could be going on,” said Raquel Forés-Toribio, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Ohio State. “Evidence suggests it is likely that there is a cloud of dust in the form of a disk around it.”

ASASSN-24fw is an F-type star — a star that is a little more massive than our sun and about twice as big —  and is located about 3,000 light-years away from Earth. Researchers estimate that the cloudy disk it’s surrounded by is about 1.3 astronomical units (AU) across, even bigger than the distance between the sun and our planet. (One AU is the distance between the center of the Earth and the center of the sun.)

Researchers suggest this disk is also likely made up of large clusters of carbon or water ice close in size to a large grain of dust found on Earth. This material is similar enough to planet-forming disks that studying it could give astronomers novel insights into stellar formation and evolution. 

Yet these findings alone don’t explain all of the system’s abnormalities, said Forés-Toribio. Instead, researchers think that a smaller, cooler star may also orbit ASASSN-24fw, which would make it a hidden binary system.  

“At this moment, with the data that we have, what we propose is that there should be two stars together in a binary system,” said Forés-Toribio. “The second star, which is much fainter and less massive, may be driving the changes in geometry leading to the eclipses.” 

While dimming systems like the one the team saw are rare, this one-in-a-million eclipsing was especially dramatic, said Chris Kochanek, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, as even when researchers searched for similar objects, they couldn’t find one that fit the same exact pattern. 

“We were hoping to find some similarities and we didn’t really find very many, which is interesting in and of itself,” said Kochanek. “But the hope is, as we find more in the future, some patterns might eventually be revealed.” 

The system was discovered as part of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) project, a network of small telescopes that monitor the entire visible night sky. Since its establishment more than a decade ago, ASAS-SN has collected about 14 million images and counting of the cosmos. 

“The universe’s capacity to surprise us is continuous,” said Krzysztof Stanek, another co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “Even with small telescopes on the ground and big telescopes in space, every time we get a new capability, we still discover new things.”

According to the team, the ASASSN-24fw system likely experiences an eclipse about once every 43.8 years, with the next one not expected to occur until around 2068. While some members of the team don’t expect to be around to study that event, they hope that the work they leave in cultivating these long-term sky surveys gives future scientists a foundation to make all sorts of new, exciting discoveries. 

“We want our data to be accessible a hundred years from now, even if we are not around,” said Stanek. “The main point of ASAS-SN is, if something happens in the sky, we’ll have historical data for it.”

In the meantime, the team wants to make use of larger telescopes like The James Webb Space Telescope and the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope Observatory to make more complete observations of the system as it returns to full brightness.  

“This study is a particularly interesting example of a broader class of still very strange objects,” said Stanek. “We learn more about astrophysics when we find things that are unusual, because it pushes our theories to the test.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Brayden JoHantgen, Michael Tucker, Lucy Lu and Dominick Rowan, as well as scientists at Boston University, University of Hawai’i, Carnegie Observatories, University of Vienna, Florida State University, The University of Melbourne, University of California, Santa Cruz and Ball State University.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

NASA’s Human Lander Challenge is an annual competition that invites university groups to explore innovative solutions to help support future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars. This year, participants created solutions for super-cold liquid propellant storage and transfer technologies, critical apparatuses vital to spacecraft propulsion and human life support systems.

Among all entrants, 12 student teams were chosen as finalists and brought to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to showcase their projects. After presenting their prototypes to a panel of NASA and industry experts, the agency announced that the Ohio State group who began their work in March with their project, the autonomous magnetized cryo-couplers with active alignment control (AMCC-AAC), was named Best Prototype. 

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott was the overall winner and recipient of a $10,000 award. The second place team, Old Dominion University was awarded $5,000, while the third place team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $3,000.

“Our project is unique in the sense that we want to future-proof the system,” said Max Heil, the team’s project manager and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “If you’re going to colonize Mars, you’re going to need technology that is pretty universal.”

While current technologies allow cryogenic liquids to be stored for short periods, scientists are looking for ways to improve the efficiency and reliability of these systems because long-term human spaceflight will require them to function effectively for weeks or even months.

Unlike other propellant transfer technologies, the AMCC-AAC is designed to eliminate the need for constant human interaction when performing refueling missions in space, said Heil. In space, safely transferring liquid propellant between two spacecraft can be challenging, but this team’s prototype suggests such issues could be solved by using AI to fully automate the process. 

“AI is so adaptable, it can do just about anything,” said Heil. “The beauty of the system is there are different ways that we could utilize it, so that’s why we're really excited about it.” 

Using a combination of LIDAR distance measurements, cameras, onboard human landing system sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms, their system would achieve autonomous coupling via robotic cooling rods. In this way, the Ohio State team’s solution would work to mitigate misalignment during cryogenic docking and reduce opportunities for potential propellant leakage, said Heil.   

Although implementation of these promising technologies may be years away, if adopted, the AMCC-AAC would also benefit NASA’s Artemis Program in its push to return humans to the moon as well as the agency’s planned operation of Gateway, an outpost in lunar orbit that will act as both a scientific hub and fuel outpost for sustained deep space exploration. 

After the event, participants also had the opportunity to connect with other subject matter experts working on NASA’s Human Landing System capabilities. Some reflected on how the chance to polish unique ideas for future spaceflight risks inspired new interest in the field.

“This started as more of a small hobby for me, but Ohio State’s support for space technology and research has turned it into a real passion,” said Zafar Shaik, another member of the team and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “I don’t know if I would have gotten this far without the university’s big push into space.”

Overall, many in the group hope that the experience opens doors for upcoming Ohio State students to get involved in NASA’s Human Lander Challenge and, more widely, helps them jump-start fulfilling careers in the emerging commercial space sector. 

“Ohio State has invested quite a bit into the space industry, and the rise in the amount of people that want to work in it is growing so rapidly,” said Heil. “So to imagine our project could be implemented on future mission systems is really rewarding for our whole team.”

The group was advised by Ohio State’s John Horack, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Other engineering members of the team include Rahul Ravishankar, Will Rueter, Kevin Subin, Nishanth Kunchala, Anastasia Anikina, Ryan Endicott, Artur Leonel Machado Ulsenheimer, Shiv Amin and Tejdeep Somi Reddy.

For decades, astronomers only had theories about where some of the heaviest elements in nature, like gold, uranium and platinum, come from. But by taking a fresh look at old archival data, researchers now estimate that up to 10% of these heavy elements in the Milky Way are derived from the ejections of highly magnetized neutron stars, called magnetars.

Until recently, astronomers had unwittingly overlooked the role that magnetars, essentially dead remnants of supernovae, might play in early galaxy formation, said Todd Thompson, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“Neutron stars are very exotic, very dense objects that are famous for having really big, very strong magnetic fields,” said Thompson. “They’re close to being black holes, but are not.”

While the origins of heavy elements had long been a quiet mystery, scientists knew that they could only form in special conditions through a method called the r-process (or rapid-neutron capture process), a set of unique and complex nuclear reactions, said Thompson. 

Scientists saw this process in action when they detected the collision of two super-dense neutron stars in 2017. This event, captured using NASA telescopes, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and other instruments, provided the first direct evidence that heavy metals were being created by celestial forces.  

But further evidence showed that other mechanisms might be needed to account for all these elements, as neutron star collisions might not produce heavy elements fast enough in the early universe. According to this new study, building on these clues helped Thompson and his collaborators recognize that powerful magnetar flares could indeed serve as a potential ejectors of heavy elements, a finding confirmed by 20-year-old observations of SGR 1806–20, a magnetar flare so bright that some measurements of the event could only be made by studying its reflection off the moon. 

By analyzing this magnetar flare event, researchers determined that the radioactive decay of the newly created elements matched up with their theoretical predictions about the timing and types of energies released by a magnetar flare after it ejected heavy r-process elements. The researchers also theorized that magnetar flares produce heavy cosmic rays, extremely high-velocity particles whose physical origin remains unknown. 

“I love new ideas about how systems work, how new discoveries work, how the universe works,” Thompson said. “That’s why results like this are really exciting.”

The study was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Magnetars may provide unique insights into galactic chemical evolution, including the formation of exoplanetary systems and their habitability. 

Not only do magnetars produce valuable metals like gold and silver that end up on Earth, the supernova explosions that cause them also produce elements like oxygen, carbon and iron that are vital for many other, more complex celestial processes. 

“All of that material they eject gets mixed into the next generation of planets and stars,” said Thompson. “Billions of years later, those atoms are incorporated into what could potentially amount to life.” 

Altogether, these findings have deep implications for astrophysics, particularly for scientists studying the origin of both heavy elements and fast radio bursts – brief shivers of electromagnetic radio waves from faraway galaxies. Understanding how matter ejects from magnetars could help scientists learn more about them. 

Due to their rarity and short duration, magnetar flares can be difficult to observe, 

and current space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble don’t have the dedicated abilities needed to detect and study their emission signals. Even more specialized observatories like NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can only see the brightest part of gamma-ray flashes from nearby galaxies. 

Instead, one proposed NASA mission, the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), could bolster the team’s work by surveying the Milky Way for energetic events like giant magnetar flares. Though another event like SGR 1806-20 might not occur this century, if a magnetar flare did detonate in our backyard, COSI could be used to better identify the individual elements created from its eruption and allow this team of researchers to confirm their theory about where heavy elements in the universe come from. 

“We’re generating a bunch of new ideas about this field, and ongoing observations will lead to even more great connections,” said Thompson.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Charles University Grant Agency and the Simons Foundation. Co-authors include Anirudh Patel and Brian D. Metzger from Columbia University, Jakub Cehula from Charles University in Prague, Eric Burns from Louisiana State University and Jared A. Goldberg from the Flatiron Institute. 

Gathered in support of future human activities in space, students, professionals and researchers from numerous industries assembled in April for the third annual Workshop for Research in Low-Earth Orbit, hosted by The Ohio State University.  

Presented by Starlab Space Inc. and the Mitsubishi Corporation, the two-day event involved scientific talks and panels aimed at preserving and advancing research in low-Earth orbit (LEO), an orbital plane relatively close to the planet’s surface. Many satellites, including the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, operate at this altitude.  

Due to the weightlessness of this unique environment, there are major benefits to doing research in microgravity. Because removing Earth’s gravity from the equation may reveal new insights about forces on the ground, scientists can use space as a test bed to investigate and study new phenomena and processes. Experiments conducted in LEO have led to the development of next-generation materials across a multitude of fields, including communications, defense, medicine and green energy.  

“Low-Earth orbit is going to push us in terms of our design capability,” said Kate Rubins, a former NASA astronaut, during a speech where she offered new perspectives of life aboard the ISS and recounted how she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. “Thinking about all these things that we’re going to design anyway for spaceflight hardware, that’s going to make this perfect equipment to take to other places on Earth.” 

During the workshop, panelists showcased their vision for the growing commercial space industry by sharing emerging technologies best suited to support human space exploration. Discussion topics ranged from devices next-gen travelers might use to enhance space station living to gadgets for astronaut health monitoring and advances that will help scientists refine future space food systems.  

Marta Nowak, a professor of architecture at Ohio State, presented student-devised ideas for addressing spaceflight habitability issues, or how astronauts interact with the spaces and objects within their built environment. Some proposals suggested specialized sleep and storage modules for work, while another recommended using furniture as an exercise component to help astronauts maintain their health.  

“The International Space Station, after more than 25 years in orbit, has proven humans can survive in space, but thriving remains elusive,” said Nowak. “NASA recognized early that improving astronauts’ quality of life would lead to better mission outcomes.”  

A one-size-fits-all approach to designing comfortable and accessible habitats won’t work to keep people connected in such confined spaces, so adapting custom living solutions for future micro-environments will be vital for successful space exploration, said Nowak.  

In advance of the many challenges NASA is likely to face over the next few decades of long-duration space exploration, speakers emphasized the need for more human-centered development in commercial research as well. “There is nothing in these [commercial] LEO stations that we are not going to need on the way to the moon or Mars,” Rubins said.  

Most notably, tech-heavy portions of the event focused on Starlab’s forthcoming research facilities, an upcoming commercial space station which, in collaboration with Ohio State’s George Washington Carver Science Park (GWCSP), promises to create essential infrastructure to prioritize scientific discovery for both astronauts in space and those of us at home. 

“Our job is to reinvent how we assist the modern world and the people in it,” said John Horack, Neil Armstrong Chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State and one of the co-hosts of the event. “That link starts with knowledge gained through research and education.” 

The event concluded with an announcement of the winner of the GWCSP Innovation Pitch Competition, a contest that invited space startups to present creative ideas on how to harness LEO for advanced scientific goals.  

Of the three team finalists, Spaero Systems, a group that includes Ohio State students Ian Harris and Nikolas Harris, placed first and received the top prize of $5,000.  

By studying light anomalies made by the newly found planet’s host star and combining their results with a larger sample from a KMTNet microlensing survey, the team found that super-Earths can exist as far from their host star as our gas giants are from the sun, said Andrew Gould, co-author of the study and professor emeritus of astronomy at The Ohio State University. 

“Scientists knew there were more small planets than big planets, but in this study, we were able to show that within this overall pattern, there are excesses and deficits,” he said. “It’s very interesting.”

While it can be relatively easy to locate worlds that orbit close to their star, planets with wider paths can be difficult to detect. Still, researchers further estimated that for every three stars, there should be at least one super-Earth present with a Jupiter-like orbital period, suggesting these massive worlds are extremely prevalent across the universe, said Gould, whose early theoretical research helped develop the field of planetary microlensing.

The findings in this study were made via microlensing, an observational effect that occurs when the presence of mass warps the fabric of space-time to a detectable degree. When a foreground object, such as a star or planet, passes between an observer and a more distant star, light is curved from the source, causing an apparent increase in the object’s brightness that can last anywhere from a few hours to several months. 

Astronomers can use these fluctuations, or bumps, in brightness to help locate alien worlds unlike our own. In this case, microlensing signals were used to locate OGLE-2016-BLG-0007, a super-Earth with a mass ratio roughly double that of Earth’s and an orbit wider than Saturn’s. 

These observations allowed the team to divide exoplanets into two groups, one that consists of super-Earths and Neptune-like planets and the other comprising gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn. This discovery opens new doors for planetary system science: Having a better understanding of exoplanet distribution can reveal new insights about the processes by which they form and evolve.

The study, led by researchers in China, Korea and at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, was recently published in the journal Science.

To explain their results, researchers also compared their findings to predictions made from theoretical simulations of planet formation. Their results showed that while exoplanets can be separated into groups by mass and makeup, the mechanisms that may produce them can vary.

“The dominant theory of gas-giant formation is through runaway gas accretion, but other people have said that it could be both accretion and gravitational instability,” said Gould. “We’re saying we can’t distinguish between those two yet.”

Doing so will likely require greater swaths of long-term data from specialized systems such as KMTNet and other microlensing instruments like it, said Richard Pogge, another co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. 

“Finding a microlensing star event is hard. Finding a microlensing star with a planet is hard-squared,” he said. “We have to look at hundreds of millions of stars to find even a hundred of these things.” 

These alignments are so rare that only 237 out of the more than 5,000 exoplanets ever discovered have been identified using the microlensing method. Now, with the help of three powerful custom-built telescopes located in South Africa, Chile and Australia, the KMTNet system routinely allows scientists to scour the cosmos for these amazing events, said Pogge. 

Most notably, it was scientists in Ohio State’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory who designed and built the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network Cameras (KMTCam) that the system relies on to identify exoplanets. And as technology continues to evolve, having dedicated, global collaborations like this one will turn visions of scientific theory into real discoveries, said Pogge. 

“We’re like paleontologists reconstructing not only the history of the universe we live in but the processes that govern it,” he said. “So helping to bring both of those pieces together into one picture has been enormously satisfying.”

Other members of Ohio State’s ISL team include Bruce Atwood, Tom O’Brien, Mark Johnson, Mark Derwent, Chris Colarosa, Jerry Mason, Daniel Pappalardo and Skip Shaller. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Tsinghua University, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the China Manned Space Project, Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange and the National Research Foundation of Korea. 

New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos ever conducted, reveal that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the standard model of how the universe works may need an update. 

This recent finding uses data from the first three years of observations and includes nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, more than doubling the dataset used in DESI’s first analysis, which was presented less than one year ago. It’s a major leap forward, improving the experiment’s precision with a dataset that is more than double what was used in DESI’s first analysis which also hinted at an evolving dark energy.

“Our results are truly remarkable,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at The Ohio State University. “We are seeing even stronger evidence for a fundamental shift in how we think about dark energy.” 

DESI is an international experiment with more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Ohio State has been a core member of the DESI collaboration for over a decade and includes 12 researchers actively working on the collection and analysis of DESI data. 

The collaboration shared their findings today in multiple papers that will be posted online and later in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. 

Taken alone, DESI’s data is consistent with our standard model of the universe. However, when paired with other measurements, there are mounting indications that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time and other models may be a better fit. Those other measurements include the light left over from the dawn of the universe; supernovae, or exploding stars; and how light from distant galaxies is warped by gravity.

“These measurements show some evidence that the standard model of cosmology is not the best explanation,” said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and a research professor of physics at Ohio State. “We now have multiple datasets that are pointing in this direction, which strengthens our confidence in our results.”    

While DESI’s previous release initially showed a preference for dynamical dark energy, many researchers thought a statistical fluke was a more likely explanation than a major discovery, said Paul Martini, one of the coordinators of the current analysis and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “Yet the evidence for dynamical dark energy has gotten stronger with more data, and it has passed new and tougher tests, so we are more confident and more excited.” 

In parallel to the DESI analysis, work is going on to plan the next phases of DESI that will follow at the end of the decade as well as for even more powerful instruments that will be built in the future. Besides DESI, other experiments coming online over the next several years will also provide complementary datasets for future analyses. 

The DESI collaboration also recently announced that its Data Release 1 (DR1) is now available for anyone to explore. With information on millions of celestial objects, the dataset will support a wide range of astrophysical research by others, in addition to DESI’s cosmology goals.

The discovery of dark energy, nearly 30 years ago, was already the biggest surprise of my scientific lifetime,” said David Weinberg, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State who also contributed to the DESI analysis. “These new measurements offer the strongest evidence so far that dark energy evolves, which would be another mind-blowing change to our understanding of how the universe works.” 

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. 

Other Ohio State members of the collaboration include Mikel Charles, Xinyi Chen, Meagan Herbold, Naim Karacayli, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. 

The Ohio State University study’s results provide new information about the timing of accretion – the process of accumulating a large amount of gas as well as solid particles that are rich in carbon and oxygen to make large planets, like Jupiter.

Planets are formed from protoplanetary disks, spinning clouds of dust and gas that are the perfect ingredients for planet formation. This new study suggests the accretion takes place early, when disks are massive and much younger than researchers previously believed.

While the number of newly confirmed exoplanets has continued to grow, the origins of these worlds and the factors that impact their formation is a puzzle scientists are still aiming to solve. Jupiter-like exoplanets, for instance, were initially thought to take nearly 3 to 5 million years to fully form; recent observations now suggest that for a gas giant like Jupiter, this process is likely closer to about 1 to 2 million years. 

This discovery challenges researchers’ existing theories regarding at what “age” of the protoplanetary disks these planets were formed, said Ji Wang, author of the study and an assistant professor in astronomy at Ohio State. The results could lead scientists to re-evaluate and revamp their theories of planet formation for the solar system and elsewhere. 

“Everything we know about exoplanets can be put in the context of the solar system and vice versa,” said Wang. “Usually planet formation is a bottom-up scheme, meaning it starts with small objects that build up to form a bigger planet, but that way takes time.”

Though exoplanets refer to planetary objects that orbit far beyond the confines of our solar system, understanding more about how they form could help researchers gain more insight into the evolution of the solar system and early Earth, whose formation was much later than Jupiter’s, but was still greatly impacted by it.

The “‘bottom-up” interpretation of planetary formation is called the “core accretion theory,” but another possible formation mechanism is when planets are formed through gravitational instability – when the clumps in a disk around a star are too massive to support themselves and collapse to form planets. Because a planet’s accretion history could be closely linked to these two compelling yet complementary formation mechanisms of evolution, Wang said, it’s important to determine which process is more often the case. 

The study was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The study analyzed a sample of seven gas giant exoplanets whose stellar and planetary chemical properties had already been directly measured by previous studies and compared them to data on the gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.

Wang showed that the early formation of these exoplanets is consistent with recent evidence that Jupiter formed much earlier than previously thought. This finding is based on the surprisingly high amount of solids these exoplanets accreted.  

All the materials accreted at the beginning of a planet’s formation increase the metallicity of its atmosphere, and by observing the traces they leave behind, researchers are able to measure the amount of solids the planet once gathered. 

The higher the metallicity, the more solids and metals – anything on the periodic table more massive than hydrogen and helium – scientists can assume were accreted during the formation process, said Wang. 

“We can infer that on average, every one of the five planets sampled accreted the equivalent of 50 Earth masses worth of solids,” he said. “Such a large amount of solids can only be found when a system is younger than 2 million years, but in our solar system, the total solids available is only on the order of 30 to 50 Earth masses worth.” 

This new data implies that the building blocks used to form the exoplanets were available at an earlier stage of the protoplanetary disk’s evolution than once expected and their availability of these building blocks greatly decreased over a span of millions of years. Because scientists usually don’t expect to find proof that planets formed that early, it’s a finding that current theories will likely struggle to reconcile, Wang said. 

“These exoplanets formed so early that there was still a large reservoir of metals available,” said Wang. “This is something that the scientific community was not fully prepared for so now they’ll have to scramble to come up with new theories to explain it.” 

Because gas giants pull in huge amounts of matter during accretion, their formation and migration through space also affects the development of rocky planets elsewhere in a protoplanetary disk. In the solar system, this phenomenon is believed to have caused Jupiter and Saturn to push Mercury out of its original orbit, and caused Mars to become much smaller than the Earth or Venus. 

That said, to aid astronomers looking to do similar planetary formation analyses in the future, the work also provides a statistical framework for inferring the total mass of solid accretion for any other exoplanet, which the study notes can be an ideal tool for investigating other kinds of complex elemental data as well. 

And while this research relied purely on archival data, Wang expects his work to be further complemented with new high-resolution data collected by better instruments, such as more powerful ground-based astronomical observatories or next-generation technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope. 

“By expanding this work with a larger sample of exoplanets, we hope to see the trend of evidence found in this paper continue to hold,” said Wang. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The oldest medal awarded by the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Draper Medal celebrates those who have made “a recent, original investigation in astronomical physics, of sufficient importance and benefit to science to merit such recognition.” It is awarded every four years.

Leroy’s work was selected for pathbreaking efforts that have characterized, “in unprecedented detail, the physical nature of the interstellar medium and its relationship to star formation in nearby galaxies.” 

“We are thrilled that the National Academy of Sciences has recognized Professor Leroy with the Henry Draper Medal,” said David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State. 

“His pioneering contributions have advanced our understanding of the composition and history of the universe, and this prestigious award further enhances the reputation of our outstanding Department of Astronomy.”

The interstellar medium that Leroy studies is the gas and dust between stars. This material fills the space in galaxies, and often contains primordial leftovers from the beginnings of the universe. Because it is the fuel from which future stars are born and a complex ecosystem that links past and future generations of stars, the interstellar medium is a crucial research target for many fields of astronomy.  

“Understanding how cosmic ecosystems evolve is a big topic in astronomy right now,” Leroy said. “Because of technology made available to us in only the last five to 10 years, we’ve been able to bring this topic into focus, making new observations that finally answer questions we’ve had for decades.

Using special telescopes to study all sorts of light, especially radio and infrared light, allows scientists to peer into the interstellar medium directly, said Leroy. Before coming to Ohio State, Leroy worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope facilities. 

It was there that he began harnessing cutting-edge technology to conduct studies on molecular gas and star formation in galaxies. This led to him co-founding the PHANGS-ALMA project, now widely recognized as the first systematic survey of the many stellar nurseries and galaxies that dot our sky. 

“Lots of people do surveys of one galaxy or a small part of our Milky Way using one type of light and get a ton of detail, but miss the big picture,” said Leroy. “With PHANGS, we have worked to line up all the best telescopes in the world on a representative set of galaxies in order to take pictures of the entire cosmic ecosystem.” 

While scientists in the past could only obtain blurred or indistinct pictures of the gas and dust in faraway galaxies, today these same structures can be seen with remarkable detail.  

By combining the ALMA radio array with powerful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, the PHANGS-ALMA project has mapped the gas, dust and newly born stars for more than 100,000 stellar nurseries across nearly 100 galaxies, providing a new generation of astrophysicists with an in-depth view of the area where stars and planets form. 

“What we've done is build an observational basis that informs how we go from a cosmos full of just spread-out hydrogen gas to the cosmos full of stars and galaxies we see around us,” Leroy said. “Our observations get at the core physics behind how galaxies turn their gas into stars.”

Many previous recipients of the Henry Draper Medal have a record of continued achievements in their fields: Six recipients have been honored with a National Medal of Science, while nine recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“This medal feels very validating for the impact of this work that our team has done,” Leroy said. "Studying the interstellar medium and star formation is important to many fields, but sometimes it can be under-the-hood research. So it’s neat to see it catching people’s imagination at the same level as black holes and pulsars.” 

Recipients also receive a cash prize of $25,000, which Leroy plans to use to bolster further collaboration with international colleagues, including other members of the PHANGS-ALMA team. Leroy praised the collaborative and supportive scientific environment at Ohio State for helping him win the award. 

“Ohio State’s astronomy department is world-famous for its invigorating, supportive atmosphere,” he said. “This is an amazing place to do cutting-edge research.” 

This rare supernova, called 2023ufx, originated from the core collapse of a red supergiant star, exploded on the outskirts of a nearby dwarf galaxy. Results of the study showed that observations of both this supernova and the galaxy it was discovered in are of low metallicity, meaning they lack an abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium.

Since the metals produced within supernovae inform their properties, including how stars evolve and die, learning more about their formation can tell astronomers much about the state of the universe when it began, especially since there were essentially no metals around during the time of its birth, said Michael Tucker, lead author of the study and a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University.

“If you’re someone who wants to predict how the Milky Way came to be, you want to have a good idea of how the first exploding stars seeded the next generation,” said Tucker. “Understanding that gives scientists a great example of how those first objects affected their surroundings.”

Dwarf galaxies in particular are useful local analogs to conditions scientists might expect to see in the early universe. Because of them, astronomers know that while the first galaxies were metal-poor, all the big, bright galaxies near the Milky Way had plenty of time for stars to explode and increase the amount of metal content, said Tucker.  

The amount of metals a supernova has also influences aspects like the number of nuclear reactions it may have or how long its explosion remains bright. It’s also one of the reasons that many low-mass stars also occasionally run the risk of collapsing into black holes. 

The study was published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

While the event observed by Tucker’s team is only the second supernova to be found with low metallicity, what’s most unusual about it is its location relative to the Milky Way, said Tucker. 

Typically, any metal-poor supernova that astronomers would expect to find would likely be too faint to see from our galaxy because of how far away they are. Now, due to the advent of more powerful instruments like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, detecting distant metal-poor galaxies has been made exponentially easier. 

“There are not that many metal-poor locations in the nearby universe and before JWST, it was difficult to find them,” said Tucker. 

But the sighting of 2023ufx turned out to be a happy accident for researchers. New-found observations of this particular supernova revealed that many of its properties and behaviors are distinctly different from other supernovae in nearby galaxies. 

For example, this supernova had a period of brightness that stayed steady for about 20 days before declining, whereas the brightness of its metal-rich counterparts usually lasted for about 100 days. The study also showed that a large amount of fast-moving material was ejected during the explosion, suggesting that it must have been spinning very quickly when it exploded. 

This result implies that rapidly spinning metal-poor stars must have been relatively common during the early days of the universe, said Tucker. His team’s theory is that the supernova likely had weak stellar winds – streams of particles emitted from the atmosphere of the star – which led it to cultivate and release so much energy. 

Overall, their observations lay the groundwork for astronomers to better investigate how metal-poor stars survive in different cosmic environments, and may even help some theorists more accurately model how supernovae behaved in the early universe. 

“If you’re someone who wants to predict how galaxies form and evolve, the first thing you want is a good idea of how the first exploding stars influenced their local area,” said Tucker. 

Future research may aim to determine if the supernova was larger at one point, whether just by being a super-massive star or if its materials were stripped away by a still undiscovered binary companion. 

Until then, researchers will have to wait for more data to become available. 

“We’re so early in the JWST era that we’re still finding so many things we don’t understand about galaxies,” said Tucker. “The long-term hope is that this study acts as a benchmark for similar discoveries.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council (ERC), the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), and NASA. Christopher S. Kochanek from Ohio State was also a co-author. 

Using the sun as a baseline, astronomers can measure when a star formed by determining its metallicity, or the level of heavy elements present within it. Metal-rich stars or nebulas formed relatively recently, while metal-poor objects were likely present during the early universe. 

Previous studies found a weak connection between metallicity rates and planet formation, noting that as a star’s metallicity goes down, so, too, does planet formation for certain planet populations, like sub-Saturns or sub-Neptunes.

Yet this work is the first to observe that under current theories, the formation of super-Earths near metal-poor stars becomes significantly more difficult, suggesting a strict cut-off for the conditions needed for one to form, said lead author Kiersten Boley, who recently received a PhD in astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“When stars cycle through life, they enrich the surrounding space until you have enough metals or iron to form planets,” said Boley. “But even for stars with lower metallicities, it was widely thought that the number of planets it could form would never reach zero.”

Other studies posited that planet formation in the Milky Way should begin when stars fall between negative 2.5 to negative 0.5 metallicity, but until now, that theory was left unproven. 

To test this prediction, the team developed and then searched a catalog of 10,000 of the most metal-poor stars observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. If correct, extrapolating known trends to search for small, short-period planets around one region of 85,000 metal-poor stars would have led them to discover about 68 super-Earths. 

Surprisingly, researchers in this work detected none, said Boley. “We essentially found a cliff where we expected to see a slow or a gradual slope that keeps going,” she said. “The expected occurrence rates do not match up at all.”

The study was published in The Astronomical Journal.

This cliff, which provides scientists with a time frame during which metallicity was too low for planets to form, extends to about half the age of the universe, meaning that super-Earths did not form early in its history. “Seven billion years ago is probably the sweet spot where we begin to see a decent bit of super-Earth formation,” Boley said. 

Moreover, as the majority of stars formed before that era have low metallicities and would have needed to wait until the Milky Way had been enriched by generations of dying stars to create the right conditions for planet formation, the results successfully propose an upper limit on the number and distribution of small planets in our galaxy.

“In a similar stellar type as our sample, we now know not to expect planet formation to be abundant once you pass a negative 0.5 metallicity region,” said Boley. “That’s kind of striking because we actually have data to show that now.”

What’s also striking is the study’s implications for those searching for life beyond Earth, as having a more precise grasp on the intricacies of planet formation can supply scientists with detailed knowledge about where in the universe life might have flourished. 

“You don’t want to search areas where life wouldn’t be conducive or in areas where you don’t even think you’re going to find a planet,” Boley said. “There’s just a plethora of questions that you can ask if you know these things.” 

Such inquiries could include determining if these exoplanets hold water, the size of their core, and if they’ve developed a strong magnetic field, all conditions conducive for generating life.  

To apply their work to other types of planet formation processes, the team will likely need to study different types of super-Earths for longer periods than they can today. Fortunately, future observations could be attained with the help of upcoming projects like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, both of which will widen the search for terrestrial planets in habitable zones like our own. 

“Those instruments will be really vital in terms of figuring out how many planets are out there and getting as many follow-up observations as we can,” said Boley. 

Other co-authors include Ji Wang from Ohio State; Jessie Christiansen, Philip Hopkins and Jon Zink from The California Institute of Technology; Kevin Hardegree-Ullman and Galen Bergsten from The University of Arizona; Eve Lee from McGill University; Rachel Fernandes from The Pennsylvania State University; and Sakhee Bhure from the University of Southern Queensland. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA. 

With 5,000 tiny robots in a mountaintop telescope, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collects and measures light from faraway space objects, granting scientists the ability to peer 11 billion years into the past. Studying how the cosmos evolved is important to understand how it began and might end, and opens up further questions about dark energy, an unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster. 

To study dark energy’s effects over the last 11 billion years, DESI recently created the largest 3D map of the universe ever constructed, marking the first time that scientists have measured the expansion history of the universe in that early period. Such precise results have revealed unprecedented new hints about how the young universe might have evolved.

DESI, an international collaboration involving more than 900 scientists from over 70 institutions around the world, is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and includes large contributions from its Ohio State members. Led by physics professor Klaus Honscheid and astronomy and physics professor Paul Martini, the group now includes professors, research scientists, and graduate and undergraduate students from across the university.

Two Ohio State members, Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy and co-convener of the Lyman alpha science working group who led efforts to validate the instrument’s latest results, and Ashley Ross, a research scientist at the university’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics and co-lead of the group that prepared DESI’s map for interpretation and accounted for changes in the instrument's performance, were integral to the recent DESI discoveries. 

“DESI looks at a wide range of times across the history of the universe and our work looked at some of those most distant measurements,” said Cuceu. “We did this by measuring a feature called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), minute ripple patterns that the universe provides that indicate the distribution of matter as it evolves.”

Large-scale surveys have used BAO measurements as cosmic rulers to map universe expansion in great detail, as researchers can get a better grasp of how dark energy may have stretched the universe at certain points and distances in time by comparing how they ripple through space. In a study led by Cuceu, one team used them to confirm the accuracy of 150 artificial datasets made to mimic DESI’s first data release, eventually concluding that the instrument’s findings were accurate throughout many different cosmological constraints. 

“We threw it at many different types of models and decisions across the analysis process, and it always seemed to generate roughly the same end result,” said Cuceu. Their findings are monumental because they show that DESI’s results provide tantalizing suggestions that call into question both typical models of cosmology and scientists’ current ideas about how physics works, said Ross.

“One of the experiment’s goals is to essentially explore the nature of dark energy and if it changes over time,” he said. “These first DESI results offer a hint that it might not be a cosmological constant.”

DESI’s first research findings are presented throughout multiple papers, which can be found on the instrument’s data documentation site.

Beyond dark energy, DESI has also been used to study many other cosmological mysteries important for physics, such as the mass of important particles called neutrinos and how individual galaxies develop over time. Martini, who was the instrument scientist for DESI during its construction and commissioning, said that what makes DESI’s results so groundbreaking is the depth of the instrument’s analysis. 

“The improvement that we have managed to achieve is really driven not just by the fact that we have 10 times as much data as previous projects, but also that we took time to really understand the steps and potential sources of uncertainty much better,” Martini said.

This analysis covers data collected from 2021 to 2022, and DESI has been collecting new data ever since, meaning there are now three years of promising new data for scientists to comb through. 

“For now, we’re experimenting in a new era of cosmology,” said Cuceu. 

Toward the end of the decade, the data DESI continues to collect will also be used to complement next-generation sky surveys, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. As those instruments collect more precise data and scientists get to work decoding their results, many are confident that even more exciting pieces of the universe’s ever-changing cosmic puzzle will be revealed. 

“It is a really exciting result that could indicate a significant change in our understanding of the universe, and the fact that we see these hints about dark energy gives us fuel to keep going,” said Honscheid, who is the current DESI instrument scientist and instrument operations lead. “The future looks extremely bright for DESI and other long-term experiments like this one.”

​DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, and by the DESI member institutions. 

The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to Tohono O’odham Nation.

Wayne Schlingman, director of the Arne Slettebak Planetarium at The Ohio State University, can still remember how momentous his first exposure to one was in 2017, when the last total solar eclipse to be visible in the United States swept a dark, narrow line across its coasts. 

“I was not prepared for the emotional effect of seeing this wall of darkness coming at you,” he said. “It was a phenomenal experience that I can’t really put into words.”  

Eclipses once existed firmly in the realm of the unexplainable; in many cultures, they were perceived as a consequence of various myths and superstitions. Now we know they occur only when the Earth, the moon and the sun’s paths are in perfect alignment.

“Our moon is fairly far from the Earth, and it’s on a 5 degree tilt,” said Schlingman. “But twice a year, when the moon has to cross the plane of the Earth’s orbit, if it happens to be the right phase, an eclipse will happen.”

Depending on the arrangement of the cosmos, the type of eclipse we can see from Earth also changes. Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow that blocks the sun’s light from view on the ground, but lunar eclipses are the result of when the sun casts Earth’s shadow onto the moon. In both cases, areas on Earth that fall within the range of complete coverage during these events are in the path of totality. 

“Eclipses happen fairly regularly,” Schlingman said. “It’s just that the area that we would normally be able to see them in is relatively small in the case of solar eclipses.” 

Though Schlingman had before witnessed partial eclipses – misalignments where only parts of a celestial body are obscured or darkened – renewed curiosity about what to expect on the ground during a total eclipse led him to dig deeper into what all scientists can learn about the universe when the world around us goes dark. 

A dark day

Unless you’re a seasoned eclipse chaser, finding yourself underneath one can be a little daunting. Though April’s total eclipse will take place around 3 p.m., as the moon’s shadow moves over the Earth, the sky will darken as if it’s night. And as the sun’s light dims, the surrounding air will become noticeably cooler and nearby bugs and animals will likely fall silent. 

If you’re viewing the event from inside the path of totality, it’s during this brief time that viewers can also temporarily remove their eclipse glasses. Most mysteriously, thin and wavy bands of light called shadow bands may also be seen faintly phasing in and out across the ground in the few minutes leading up to and after totality.  

Regardless of how eerie these conditions may seem, an eclipse is a fascinating sight to behold, even more so because they provide unique opportunities for scientists to make important scientific discoveries, said Schlingman. 

“By doing experiments on the ground, there’s a lot of stuff that we can learn about our planet and even the sun during this time,” he said. To date, researchers have used the phenomenon to decipher the structure of Earth’s atmosphere, discover new elements, and reveal unknown details about the inner workings of our sun and the rest of the space environment. 

But what sets 2024’s eclipse apart from 2017’s is that totality is expected to last about 4 minutes and 28 seconds, almost double the duration of the previous total solar eclipse. 

This year’s eclipse path is also much wider, causing it to pass over much more densely populated areas than its predecessor. This additional time and space will undoubtedly offer scientists a larger window for making more precise measurements about the eclipses’ impacts and allow millions more onlookers to share in the delight. 

“After seeing it, I instantly knew why people chase these things for the rest of their lives,” said Schlingman. “There was no question in my mind, the total solar eclipse is just stunning.” 

Looking ahead

If you do miss this total solar eclipse, the next one to be visible in the contiguous U.S. won’t occur until Aug. 24, 2044, and Ohio won’t see another until 2099. 

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean you can’t mark your calendar to track other eye-opening astronomical events. According to Schlingman, stellar happenings like this one create amazing opportunities for people to engage with science on a different level than they’d normally be able to, and for younger generations, can open unexpected avenues to discover more about the aspects of the day that they’re passionate about.  

“If you’re in Ohio, you should at least try to experience totality briefly, because this is literally in our backyard,” he said. “It's something for everyone to be involved in, and hopefully someone else finds it as inspirational as I do."

Vision experts: Be safe, not sorry, when viewing eclipse

While craning our necks to watch the total solar eclipse on April 8, we need to be serious about protecting our eyes, according to vision experts at The Ohio State University.

Aaron Zimmerman, clinical professor at Ohio State’s College of Optometry, says we should never look directly at the sun because there is potential risk to damage the retina.

“The sun is usually uninteresting and is so bright and uncomfortable that humans don’t look directly at it,” Zimmerman said. “Of course, there are times when you accidentally look at it, or it’s reflected, and it’s uncomfortable, but we quickly look away from it and this short exposure doesn’t result in harm.”

It’s when we stare longer at a bright light source, such as the sun or a laser, that there’s damage, says Sayoko Moroi, professor and chair of ophthalmology and visual sciences at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“You don’t recover from it. Once the retina is damaged, it’s damaged,” Moroi said.

Read more on Ohio State Health & Discovery.

Published recently in The Astronomical Journal, a new paper details how a team of astronomers from The Ohio State University examined upcoming telescopes’ ability to detect chemical traces of oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane and water on 10 rocky exoplanets. These elements are biosignatures also found in Earth’s atmosphere that can provide key scientific evidence of life.  

The study found that for a pair of these nearby worlds, Proxima Centauri b and GJ 887 b, these telescopes are highly adept at detecting the presence of potential biosignatures. Of the two, findings show that only for Proxima Centauri b would the machines be able to detect carbon dioxide if it were present. Though no exoplanet has been found to precisely twin Earth’s early conditions for life, this work suggests that if examined in greater detail, such unique Super Earths – planets more massive than Earth but smaller than Neptune – could make a suitable target for future research missions. 

To further the search for habitable planets, Huihao Zhang, lead author of the study and a senior in astronomy at Ohio State, and his colleagues also sought to determine the effectiveness of specialized imaging instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and other Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) such as the European Extremely Large Telescope, the Thirty-Meter-Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope at directly imaging exoplanets. 

“Not every planet is suitable for direct imaging, but that’s why simulations give us a rough idea of what the ELTs would have delivered and the promises they’re meant to hold when they are built,“ said Zhang. 

The direct method of imaging exoplanets involves using a coronagraph or starshade to block a host star’s light, allowing for scientists to capture a faint image of the new world in orbit. But because locating them in this way can be difficult and time-consuming, the researchers aimed to see how well the ELT telescopes might handle the challenge. To do this, they tested each telescope’s instruments’ abilities to differentiate universal background noise from the planetary noise they aimed to capture while detecting biosignatures; called the signal-to-noise ratio, the higher it is, the easier a planet’s wavelength is able to be detected and analyzed. 

Results showed that the direct imaging mode of one of the European ELT’s instruments, called the Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph, performed better for three planets (GJ 887 b, Proxima b and Wolf 1061 c) in discerning the presence of methane, carbon dioxide and water, while its High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph instrument could detect methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen and water, but needed a great deal more exposure time.

Additionally, since these conclusions were about instruments that will have to peer through the chemical fog of Earth’s atmosphere to progress the search for cosmic life, they were compared to JWST’s current outer space capabilities, said Zhang. 

“It’s hard to say whether space telescopes are better than ground-based telescopes, because they’re different,” he said. “They have different environments, different locations, and their observations have different influences.”

In this case, findings revealed that while GJ 887 b is one of the most suitable targets for ELT direct imaging as its location and size result in an especially high signal-to-noise ratio, for some transiting planets, such as the TRAPPIST-1 system, JWST’s techniques for studying planetary atmospheres are more suitable for detecting them than direct imaging from the ELTs on Earth. 

But because the study took on a more conservative assumption with the data, Zhang said, the true effectiveness of future astronomical tools could still surprise scientists. And subtle contrasts in performance aside, these powerful technologies serve to widen our understanding of the universe and are meant to complement each other, said Ji Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in astronomy at Ohio State. It’s why studies like this one, that assess the limitations of those technologies, is necessary, he said. 

“The importance of simulation, especially for missions that cost billions of dollars, cannot be stressed enough,” said Wang. “Not only do people have to build the hardware, they also try really hard to simulate the performance and be prepared to achieve those glorious results.”

In all likelihood, as the ELTs won’t be completed until the tail end of the decade, researchers’ next steps will settle around simulating how well future ELT instruments will take to investigating the intricacies of our own planet’s rampant proofs of life. 

“We want to see to what extent we can study our atmosphere to exquisite detail and how much information we can extract from it,” said Wang. “Because if we cannot answer habitability questions with Earth’s atmosphere, then there’s no way we can start to answer these questions around other planets.”

To date, nearly 50% of all rocky exoplanets yet discovered have been found capable of maintaining magma on their surfaces, likely because these planets are so close to their host stars they orbit in fewer than 10 days. Being so close causes the planet to be bombarded by harsh weather and forces surface temperatures to the extreme, making it all but completely inhospitable to life as we know it today. 

Now, in a new study, scientists have shown that these sweeping molten oceans have a large influence on the observed properties of hot rocky Super-Earths, such as their size and evolutionary path.  

Their research, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, found that due to lava’s extremely compressible nature, oceans of magma can cause lava-rich planets without atmospheres to be modestly denser than similarly sized solid planets as well as impact the structure of their mantles, the thick inner layer that surrounds a planet’s core.  

Even so, since these objects are notoriously under-studied, it can be a difficult task to characterize the fundamental workings of lava planets, said Kiersten Boley, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. 

“Lava worlds are very odd, very interesting things and because of the way we detect exoplanets, we’re more biased to finding them,” said Boley, whose research revolves around understanding what essential ingredients makes exoplanets unique and how tweaking those elements, or in the case of lava worlds, their temperatures, can completely change them.  

One of the most well-known of these mysterious burning worlds is 55 Cancri e, an exoplanet about 41 light-years away that scientists describe as home to both sparkling skies and roiling lava seas.  

While there are objects in our solar system, such as Jupiter’s moon Io, that are extremely volcanically active, there aren’t true lava planets in our stretch of the cosmos that scientists can get up close and personal to study. However, investigating how the composition of magma oceans contributes to the evolution of other planets, such as for how long they stay molten and for what reasons they eventually cool down, can offer clues into Earth’s own fiery history, said Boley.  

“When planets initially form, particularly for rocky terrestrial planets, they go through a magma ocean stage as they’re cooling down,” said Boley. “So lava worlds can give us some insight into what may have happened in the evolution of nearly any terrestrial planet.”  

Using the exoplanet interior modeler software Exoplex and data collected from previous studies to construct a module that included information on several types of magma compositions, researchers simulated several evolutionary scenarios of an Earth-like planet with surface temperatures from between 2600 and 3860 degrees Fahrenheit – the melting point at which the planet’s solid mantle would turn to liquid.  

From the models they created, the team was able to discern that mantles of magma ocean planets can take on one of three forms: the first in which the entire mantle is completely molten, the second where a magma ocean lies on the surface, and a third sandwich-esque model that consists of a magma ocean at the surface, a solid rock layer in the middle and another layer of molten magma that lies closest to the planet’s core.  

The results suggest that the second and third forms are slightly more common than planets that are completely molten. Depending on the composition of magma oceans, some atmosphere-free exoplanets are better than others at trapping volatile elements – compounds such as oxygen and carbon necessary to the formation of early atmospheres – for billions of years. 

For example, the study notes that a basal magma class planet that is 4 times more massive than Earth can trap more than 130 times the mass of water than in Earth’s oceans today, and about 1,000 times the amount of carbon currently present in the planet’s surface and crust.  

“When we’re talking about the evolution of a planet and its potential to have different elements that you would need to support life, being able to trap a lot of volatile elements within their mantles could have greater implications for habitability,” said Boley.  

Lava planets are a long way from becoming habitable enough to support life, but it’s important to understand the processes that help these worlds to get there. Nevertheless, this study makes clear that measuring their density isn’t exactly the best way to characterize these worlds when comparing them to solid exoplanets as a magma ocean neither significantly increases nor decreases its planet’s density, said Boley.  

Instead, their research reveals that scientists should focus on other terrestrial parameters such as fluctuations in a planet’s surface gravity to test their theories about how hot lava worlds operate, especially if future researchers plan on using their data to aid in larger planetary studies.  

“This work, which is a combination of earth sciences and astronomy, basically opens up exciting new questions about lava worlds,” said Boley.  

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors are Wendy Panero, Joseph Schulze, Romy Martinez and Ji Wang, all from Ohio State, as well as Cayman Unterborn from the Southwest Research Institute.  

One of the less well-understood elementary particles, neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter, and instead travel invisibly through it at almost the speed of light. These ghostly particles outnumber all the atoms in the universe and are always passing harmlessly through our bodies, but due to their low mass and lack of an electric charge they can be incredibly difficult to find and study.

But in a study published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at The Ohio State University have established a new framework detailing how supernovae – massive explosions that herald the death of collapsing stars – could be used as powerful tools to study how neutrino self-interactions can cause vast cosmological changes in the universe.

“Neutrinos only have very small rates of interaction with typical matter, so it’s difficult to detect them and test any of their properties,” said Po-Wen Chang, lead author of the study and a graduate student in physics at Ohio State. “That’s why we have to use astrophysics and cosmology to discover interesting phenomena about them.”

Thought to have been important to the formation of the early universe, neutrinos are still puzzling to scientists, despite having learned that they originate from a number of sources, such as in nuclear reactors or the insides of dying stars. But by calculating how self-interactions would affect the neutrino signal from Supernova 1987A, the nearest supernova observed in modern times, researchers found that when neutrinos do interact with themselves, they form a tightly coupled fluid that expands under relativistic hydrodynamics – a branch of physics that deals with how flows impact solid objects in one of two different ways.  

In the case of what’s called a “burst outflow,” the team theorizes that much like popping a highly pressurized balloon in the vacuum of space would push energy outward, a burst produces a neutrino fluid that moves in all directions. The second case, described as a “wind outflow,” imagines a highly pressurized balloon with many nozzles, wherein neutrinos escape at a more constant flow rate, similar to a jet of steady wind. 

While the wind-outflow theory is more likely to take place in nature, said Chang, if the burst case is realized, scientists could see new observable neutrino signatures emitted from supernovae, allowing unprecedented sensitivity to neutrino self-interactions.

One of the reasons it’s so vital to understand these mechanisms is that if neutrinos are acting as a fluid, that means they are acting together, as a collective. And if the properties of neutrinos are different as a collective than individually, then the physics of supernovae could experience changes too. But whether these changes are due solely to the burst case or the outflow case remains to be seen. 

“The dynamics of supernovae are complicated, but this result is promising because with relativistic hydrodynamics we know there’s a fork in the road in understanding how they work now,” said Chang. 

Still, further research needs to be done before scientists can cross off the possibility of the burst case happening inside supernovae as well. 

Despite these uncertainties, the study is a huge milestone in answering the decades-old astrophysical issue of how neutrinos actually scatter when ejected from supernovae, said John Beacom, co-author of the study and a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State. This study found that in the burst case, unprecedented sensitivity to neutrino self-interactions is possible even with sparse neutrino data from SN 1987A and conservative analysis assumptions.

“This problem has lain basically untouched for 35 years,” said Beacom. “So even though we were not able to completely solve how neutrinos affect supernovae, what we’re excited about is that we were able to make a substantial step forward.”

Down the road, the team hopes their work will be used as a stepping stone to further investigate neutrino self-interactions. Yet because only about two or three supernovae happen per century in the Milky Way, it’s likely researchers will have to wait decades more to collect enough new neutrino data to prove their ideas. 

“We’re always praying for another galactic supernova to happen somewhere and soon, but the best we can do is try to build on what we know as much as possible before it happens,” said Chang. 

Other co-authors were Ivan Esteban, Todd Thompson and Christopher M. Hirata, all of Ohio State. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation.

Dubbed the extremely large telescopes (ELTs), these observatories, which include the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), will be some of the largest ground-based telescopes ever built, and their instruments are expected to exceed the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Data collected with their powerful instruments will allow astronomers to use Doppler Imaging – a technique that can recreate 2D maps of an object’s surface – to make accurate measurements of the magnetism and chemistry of ultracool targets, or cosmic objects with temperatures less than 2700 K, such as brown dwarfs (BDs) or very low-mass stars (VLMs) –  and even some exoplanets.

Besides helping to improve our understanding of some of the most mysterious objects in the universe, having the capability to study the chemical compositions of these objects in a more precise manner also offers greater insight into the search for life on other worlds, said Michael Plummer, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“Learning about the atmospheres of other objects outside our solar system not only informs us how Earth’s atmosphere may behave but allows scientists to scale those concepts to study potentially habitable planets,” said Plummer.

The study was published this month in The Astrophysical Journal. 

Magnetism is especially important to search for worlds similar to our own as magnetic fields, specifically for smaller star systems, are considered necessary to support and influence whether a planet can support life on its surface.  

To aid in this hunt, Plummer and Ji Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State, previously developed a publicly available analytical code called Imber to simulate and infer the presence of surface discrepancies like magnetic star spots, cloud systems, and other atmospheric phenomena such as hurricanes on distant objects.

In this study, they used the technique to estimate the scientific capabilities of various ELTs’ instruments to detect surface variations on six targets: the star of Trappist-1, a well-studied seven-planet system about 40 light-years from Earth, two brown dwarfs, and three exoplanets.        

They used their technique to investigate the abilities of the following instruments: the GMT’s Consortium Large Earth Finder (GMT/GCLEF), the ELT’s Mid-Infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (ELT/METIS) and the TMT’s Multi-Objective Diffraction-limited High-Resolution Infrared Spectrograph (MODHIS).

Researchers found that while discerning star spots on Trappist-1 was challenging for all three instruments due to its edge-on inclination – or its orbit in parallel to the rest of the sky – ELT and TMT could make high-resolution observations of the brown dwarfs and exoplanets over a single rotation. 

Conversely, GMT’s instruments required multiple rounds of observations to determine the presence of surface irregularities on the study’s chosen exoplanets. Overall, the study shows that their technique can provide an accurate estimation of ELTs future abilities and help determine if future targets would be worth investigating on a larger scale. 

Plummer also said their technique garnered interest from scientists looking to identify or confirm planetary bodies found using the radial velocity method – a way to find exoplanets by studying the slight gravitational effect an object has on the star it orbits. In essence, their research is the first step towards helping scientists use future astronomical instruments to the best of their abilities.

“The more we learn about other similar planets to Earth, the more those discoveries should inform Earth science itself,” said Plummer. “Our work is particularly well-suited to help make those real-world observations.”

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

In stars like our sun, surface magnetism is linked to stellar spin, a process similar to the inner workings of a hand-cranked flashlight. Strong magnetic fields are seen in the hearts of magnetic sunspot regions, and cause a variety of space weather phenomena. Until now, low-mass stars – celestial bodies of lower mass than our sun that can rotate either very rapidly or relatively slowly – were thought to exhibit very low levels of magnetic activity, an assumption which has primed them as ideal host stars for potentially habitable planets.

In a new study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers from The Ohio State University argue that a new internal mechanism called core-envelope decoupling – when the surface and core of the star start out spinning at the same rate, then drift apart – might be responsible for enhancing magnetic fields on cool stars, a process which could intensify their radiation for billions of years and impact the habitability of their nearby exoplanets.

The research was made possible due to a technique that Lyra Cao, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at Ohio State, and co-author Marc Pinsonneault, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, developed earlier this year to make and characterize starspot and magnetic field measurements.

Although low-mass stars are the most common stars in the Milky Way and are often hosts to exoplanets, scientists know comparatively little about them, said Cao.

For decades, it was assumed that the physical processes of lower mass stars followed those of solar-type stars. Because stars gradually lose their angular momentum as they spin down, astronomers can use stellar spins as a device to understand the nature of a star’s physical processes, and how they interact with their companions and their surroundings. However, there are times where the stellar rotation clock appears to stop in place, Cao said. 

Using public data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to study a sample of 136 stars in M44, a star crib also known as Praesepe, or the Beehive cluster, the team found that the magnetic fields of the low-mass stars in the region appeared much stronger than current models could explain.

While previous research revealed that the Beehive cluster is home to many stars that defy current theories of rotational evolution, one of Cao’s team’s most exciting discoveries was determining that these stars’ magnetic fields may be just as unusual – far stronger than predicted by current models.

“To see a link between the magnetic enhancement and rotational anomalies was incredibly exciting,” said Cao. “It indicates that there might be some interesting physics at play here.” The team also hypothesized that the process of syncing up a star’s core and the envelope might induce a magnetism found in these stars that would have a starkly different origin from the kind seen on the sun.

“We’re finding evidence that there’s a different kind of dynamo mechanism driving the magnetism of these stars,” said Cao. “This work shows that stellar physics can have surprising implications for other fields.”

According to the study, these findings have important implications for our understanding of astrophysics, particularly on the hunt for life on other planets. “Stars experiencing this enhanced magnetism are likely going to be battering their planets with high-energy radiation,“ Cao said. “This effect is predicted to last for billions of years on some stars, so it’s important to understand what it might do to our ideas of habitability.”

But these findings shouldn’t put a damper on the search for extraplanetary existence. With further research, the team’s discovery could help provide more insight into where to look for planetary systems capable of hosting life. But here on Earth, Cao believes her team’s discoveries might lead to better simulations and theoretical models of stellar evolution. 

“The next thing to do is verify that enhanced magnetism happens on a much larger scale,” said Cao. “If we can understand what’s going on in the interiors of these stars as they experience shear-enhanced magnetism, it’s going to lead the science in a new direction.”

The study was supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. Jennifer van Saders from the University of Hawaii was also a co-author. 

As an added bonus, researchers found a second planet that is orbiting the same two stars, which is only the second confirmed multi-planet circumbinary system found to date. The study was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

Circumbinary planets were once relegated to only science fiction, but thanks to data collected from NASA’s Kepler mission, astronomers now know that multiple star systems are more common than previously thought. While many may not have planets of their own, roughly half the stars in the sky are made up of double, triple or quaternary formations. The other half are single stars like our sun, yet despite their quantity, scientists understand very little about the planets that form around multiple star systems.

“When a planet orbits two stars, it can be a bit more complicated to find because both of its stars are also moving through space,” said David Martin, co-author of the study and NASA Sagan Fellow in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “So how we can detect these stars’ exoplanets, and the way in which they are formed, are all quite different.”

The newly discovered system is called TOI-1338/BEBOP-1 for the planetary detection survey Binaries Escorted by Orbiting Planets, the team initiated to increase the number of known circumbinary planets. To date, it is only the second binary star system known to host multiple planets ever confirmed. Only 12 circumbinary planet systems have ever been discovered. 

At the heart of their finding, the study revealed a large gas giant, which has an orbital period around the two stars of 215 days. 

But what makes their discovery so special, Martin said, is how the planet was located. Of the more than 5,000 worlds that astronomers have found since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, most have been tracked down using a technique called the transit method. Widely considered to be the most effective way of proving the existence of other worlds, the method allows astronomers to indirectly detect a planet by measuring a dip in the brightness of light when a planet crosses between a star and an observer on Earth. 

However, in this study, researchers detail the first-ever detection of a known circumbinary planet solely using observations made with the radial velocities method, an approach that relies on measuring the gravitational shifts planets exert on their host stars over time. It’s the same approach used to find the 1995 exoplanet, now known as Dimidium.

“Whereas people were previously able to find planets around single stars using radial velocities pretty easily, this technique was not being successfully used to search for binaries,” said Martin.

It’s because radial velocities, while successful at detecting planets around single stars, have historically struggled to find planets in binaries where there are multiple sets of stellar spectra, he said. Yet by targeting binaries where one star is much brighter than the other, the BEBOP program could soon help find many more, said Martin. 

Previous research has shown that radial velocities could be used to locate a planetary system astronomers were already aware of called Kepler-16, but this study advances that work by discovering a brand new planet.

The discovery could also bode well for scientists devoted to looking for life on other planets, as according to the study, the inner planet already found in this binary system would be a prime candidate for atmospheric study by the James Webb Space Telescope. Atmospheric characterizations search for proof of biological activity and assess the likelihood of a planet having conditions conducive to life as humans on Earth know it. 

If NASA does choose to turn Webb’s eye toward the planet in this study, it would be the first system of its kind amenable to atmospheric investigation, Martin said. “If we are to unveil the mysteries and intricacies behind circumbinary planets, our discovery provides a new hope,” he said. 

Their work was supported by NASA, the European Research Council and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). 

In a study recently published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by scientists at The Ohio State University was able to show that the shells of these structures – dubbed “eRosita bubbles” after being found by the eRosita X-ray telescope – are more complex than previously thought. 

Although they bear a striking similarity in shape to Fermi bubbles, eRosita bubbles are larger and more energetic than their counterparts. Known together as the “galactic bubbles” due to their size and location, they provide an exciting opportunity to study star formation history as well as reveal new clues about how the Milky Way came to be, said Anjali Gupta, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State who is now a professor of astronomy at Columbus State Community College.

These bubbles exist in the gas that surrounds galaxies, an area which is called the circumgalactic medium.

“Our goal was really to learn more about the circumgalactic medium, a place very important in understanding how our galaxy formed and evolved,” Gupta said. “A lot of the regions that we were studying happened to be in the region of the bubbles, so we wanted to see how different the bubbles are when compared to the regions which are away from the bubble.”

Previous studies had assumed that these bubbles were heated by the shock of gas as it blows outward from the galaxy, but this paper’s main findings suggest the temperature of the gas within the bubbles isn’t significantly different from the area outside of it.

“We were surprised to find that the temperature of the bubble region and out of the bubble region were the same,” said Gupta. Additionally, the study demonstrates that these bubbles are so bright because they’re filled with extremely dense gas, not because they are at hotter temperatures than the surrounding environment. 

Gupta and Smita Mathur, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, did their analysis using observations made by the Suzaku satellite, a collaborative mission between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. 

By analyzing 230 archival observations made between 2005 and 2014, researchers were able to characterize the diffuse emission – the electromagnetic radiation from very low density gas – of the galactic bubbles, as well as the other hot gases that surround them. 

Although the origin of these bubbles has been debated in scientific literature, this study is the first that begins to settle it, said Mathur. As the team found an abundance of non-solar neon-oxygen and magnesium-oxygen ratios in the shells, their results strongly suggest that galactic bubbles were originally formed by nuclear star-forming activity, or the injection of energy by massive stars and other kinds of astrophysical phenomena, rather than through the activities of a supermassive black hole. 

“Our data supports the theory that these bubbles are most likely formed due to intense star formation activity at the galactic center, as opposed to black hole activity occurring at the galactic center,” Mathur said. To further investigate the implications their discovery may have for other aspects of astronomy, the team hopes to use new data from other upcoming space missions to continue characterizing the properties of these bubbles, as well as work on novel ways to analyze the data they already have. 

“Scientists really do need to understand the formation of the bubble structure, so by using different techniques to better our models, we’ll be able to better constrain the temperature and the emission measures that we are looking for,” said Gupta. 

Other co-authors were Joshua Kingsbury and Sanskriti Das of Ohio State and Yair Krongold of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This work was supported by NASA.

Using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new study details how these energetic winds, once released from the center of a galaxy, directly influence the temperature and metal distribution of the rest of the region.

“Galactic winds are a large part of galaxy evolution in general,” said Sebastian Lopez, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “As they blow from one end of a galaxy to another, they alter the distribution of metals across the disk and enrich the surrounding intergalactic space.”

In investigating the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 253, researchers found that while the amount of these elements can vary, the abundances of oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur and iron peaked in the center of the galaxy and decreased with distance from it. This indicates that as hot gas cools the farther away it travels from the center, it leaves behind a lower concentration of these elements. 

Learning more about how the celestial detritus that make up these vast galaxies are disseminated across the cosmos could help astronomers more deeply understand how galactic formation works in other areas of the universe. “Our research could reflect that the size of a galaxy, or even its morphology, could impact how gas leaves these systems,” Lopez said. The study was published online in The Astrophysical Journal.

Between 1999 and 2018, Chandra observed NGC 253 only seven times, but by analyzing image and spectral data taken from those observations, Lopez and his team were able to use specialized computer software to identify the emission lines left by passing winds. While compiling this data, they found that the research runs counter to  previous X-ray studies done on NGC 253, which posit that galactic winds expand spherically, or in a bubble-like shape.

Instead, the models Lopez’s team created show how the winds move in opposite directions from the middle of the galaxy and then radiate outwards toward the upper right and lower left regions. Lopez places much of this discrepancy on the data available at the time of the previous studies and the technological strides scientists have made since.

Still, there were a few similarities to previous work that did catch researchers’ interest. To determine how galactic emission differences arise and if these differences depend on the galaxy’s properties, they compared NGC 253 to the results of studies done on the galaxy M82, a similar starburst system located some 12 million light-years away from Earth. After detecting the same metals and similar distributions within M82 that they did with NGC 253, Lopez said that comparing the two led the team to discern that a process called charge exchange – the stripping of an electron from a neutral atom by an ion – plays a large part in X-ray emission.

“In order for scientists to create a realistic galaxy in simulations, we need to know where these heavy elements are going,” Lopez said. “Because if you were to model it and not include charge exchange into these models, they wouldn’t match up.” If such calculations were inherently wrong, he said, scientists would have a hard time using their observations to make educated guesses about what the universe looks like and how it operates.

But Lopez imagines the more accurate models created from this study will help astronomers study the winds of other galaxies, such as calculating their velocities and discovering what makes them so good at creating unique stellar environments. “Next, we want to do this analysis for a larger set of different galaxies and see how things change,” Lopez said.

This research was supported by NASA. Co-authors were Laura Lopez, Dustin Nguyen, Todd Thompson, Smita Mathur and Amy Sardone of Ohio State, Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, and Neven Vulic of Eureka Scientific.

The study, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, provides new infrared measurements of one of the brightest galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood, NGC 1566, also known as the Spanish Dancer. Located about 40 million light-years away from Earth, the galaxy’s extremely active center has led it to become especially popular with scientists aiming to learn more about how star-forming nebulae form and evolve. 

In this case, scientists were able to survey a Type 1a supernova – the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, which Michael Tucker, a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, said researchers caught by mere chance while studying NGC 1566.

“White dwarf explosions are important to the field of cosmology, as astronomers often use them as indicators of distance,” said Tucker. “They also produce a huge chunk of the iron group elements in the universe, such as iron, cobalt and nickel.”

The research was made possible thanks to the PHANGS-JWST Survey, which, due to its vast inventory of star cluster measurements, was used to create a reference dataset to study in nearby galaxies. By analyzing images taken of the supernova’s core, Tucker and co-author Ness Mayker Chen, a graduate student in astronomy at Ohio State who led the study, aimed to investigate how certain chemical elements are emitted into the surrounding cosmos after an explosion.

For instance, light elements like hydrogen and helium were formed during the big bang, but heavier elements can be created only through the thermonuclear reactions that happen inside supernovas. Understanding how these stellar reactions affect the distribution of iron elements around the cosmos could give researchers deeper insight into the chemical formation of the universe, said Tucker. 

“As a supernova explodes, it expands, and as it does so, we can essentially see different layers of the ejecta, which allows us to probe the nebula’s core,” he said. Powered by a process called radioactive decay – wherein an unstable atom releases energy to become more stable – supernovas emit radioactive high-energy photons like uranium-238. In this instance, the study specifically focused on how the isotope cobalt-56 decays into iron-56. 

Using data from JWST’s near-infrared and mid-infrared camera instruments to investigate the evolution of these emissions, researchers found that more than 200 days after the initial event, supernova ejecta was still visible at infrared wavelengths that would have been impossible to image from the ground. 

“This is one of those studies where if our results weren’t what we expected, it would have been really concerning,” he said. “We’ve always made the assumption that energy doesn’t escape the ejecta, but until JWST, it was only a theory.”

For many years, it was unclear whether fast-moving particles produced when cobalt-56 decays into iron-56 seeped into the surrounding environment, or were held back by the magnetic fields supernovas create. 

Yet by providing new insight into the cooling properties of supernova ejecta, the study confirms that in most circumstances, ejecta doesn’t escape the confines of the explosion. This reaffirms many of the assumptions scientists have made in the past about how these complex entities work, Tucker said. 

“This study validates almost 20 years’ worth of science,” he said. “It doesn’t answer every question, but it does a good job of at least showing that our assumptions haven’t been catastrophically wrong.”

Future JWST observations will continue to help scientists develop their theories about star formation and evolution, but Tucker said that further access to other types of imaging filters could help test them as well, creating more opportunities to understand wonders far beyond the edges of our own galaxy. 

“The power of JWST is really unparalleled,” said Tucker. “It’s really promising that we’re accomplishing this kind of science and with JWST, there’s a good chance we’ll not only be able to do the same for different kinds of supernovas, but do it even better.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and others.

Our sun is at times dotted with sunspots, cool dark regions on the stellar surface generated by strong magnetic fields, which suppress churning motions and impede the free escape of light. On other stars, these phenomena are called starspots, said Lyra Cao, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. 

“Our study is the first to precisely characterize the spottiness of stars and use it to directly test theories of stellar magnetism,” said Cao. “This technique is so precise and broadly applicable that it can become a powerful new tool in the study of stellar physics.”

Use of the technique will soon allow Cao and her colleagues to release a catalog of starspot and magnetic field measurements for more than 700,000 stars – increasing the number of these measurements available to scientists by three orders of magnitude.

Since sunspots were first discovered in the 17th century, scientists have typically detected signatures of stellar magnetism indirectly, by looking at stars through different filters or detecting the modulation of spots in a star’s light curve. But by analyzing legacy high-resolution infrared spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Cao was able to develop a technique for identifying starspots in 240 stars from two open star clusters, the Pleiades and M67. 

The study showed that precision starspot measurements are a powerful new class of data which could help researchers understand how stellar magnetic fields work. Due to precision of the technique, Cao was also able to see how age and rotation affected the magnetic fields on these stars. 

“It was lurking in plain sight: Within the spectrum, there was a cooler component corresponding to the starspot which was only visible in the infrared,” Cao said.

As it turns out, younger stars can be enveloped in starspots – some of them more “spot” than star, with 80% of their surfaces covered. During her studies, Cao realized that these larger cooler regions may block so much light, it might have a measurable effect on these stars. Since the light must eventually escape, she said, the star compensates by expanding and cooling enough to make more surface area available for radiation. 

Researchers also found that relying on classical methods to estimate the temperatures of these stars could be wrong by more than 100 degrees. Because scientists often rely on a star’s temperature when trying to estimate its size, astronomers could wrongly assume the radius of the star is smaller than it actually is.

“When this happens, you start seeing large changes in the stars’ structure, which can throw other important astronomical measurements off as well,” said Cao. As scientists use stellar parameters to understand our solar neighborhood and galaxy, and at times, the sizes and habitability prospects of nearby exoplanets, this method could dramatically improve researchers’ ability to test other scientific theories.

Additionally, researchers found a class of stars that are too active for standard theories to explain in the Pleiades cluster. According to Cao, these stars are not only magnetic and rife with starspots, but also overflowing with UV and X-ray radiation.

“You wouldn’t want to live around these stars,” said Cao. “But understanding why these stars are so active could change our models and criteria for exoplanetary habitability.” Further study of these unusual stars could hold the key for understanding why low mass stars are so active, the study notes.

“We can directly study the evolution of stellar magnetism in hundreds of thousands of stars with this new dataset, so we expect this will help develop key insights in our understanding of stars and planets,” said Cao.

Marc Pinsonneault, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, co-authored the study. This work was supported by NASA.

Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, an international team of researchers has found new evidence that red giants, dying stars that have exhausted their supply of hydrogen and are in the final stages of stellar evolution, often experience large-scale structural variations, or what are known as “glitches” deep inside their inner core. 

The stellar glitches popularized in the media have to do with a star’s rotation, but lead author Mathieu Vrard studies a different kind of defect. The glitches in this study can affect a star’s oscillations, or the frequencies and paths that sound waves travel when passing through a star.

Red clump stars, helium-core burning objects, are often used in astrophysical studies as probes of distance to measure aspects like galaxy density, and to learn more about the physical processes behind stellar chemical evolution. So it’s vital that scientists understand why these discontinuities happen, said Vrard, a postdoctoral research associate in astronomy at the Ohio State University. 

“By analyzing these variations, we can use them to obtain not only the global parameters of the star, but also information on the precise structure of those objects,” he said. 

The study, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to perform detailed observational characterizations on the deepest layers of these red giants. 

In order to determine if these glitches were becoming more prevalent across certain star groups, the team selected a sample of 359 red giants that were below a certain stellar mass, and measured various properties and individual frequencies of each star.

The team found proof that 24 of the red giants surveyed (about 7% of those in the sample) had experienced intermittent structural discontinuities at one point or another during their lifetime. While 7% may not seem like much, if applied to all of the known stars in our universe, the number of stars that have these irregularities would be enormous. 

There are two main theories that explain how these disturbances might work. The first scenario posits that glitches are present throughout the star’s evolution, but are generally very weak and below the threshold for what astronomers would categorize as a true discontinuity.

The second suggests that irregularities are “smoothed out” by some unknown physical process that later leads to changes in the structure of the star’s core.

As it turns out, the first scenario is not supported by this study’s model, which predicts that glitches observed are actually a common occurrence, but more precise data is needed before scientists can confidently subscribe to the second. 

“What we think is that the second theory might hold up better because the first one didn't make sense with our observations,” Vrard said. 

As the study offers a better characterization of the physical processes taking place inside red-giant stars, Vrard’s work could potentially have large implications for the field of asteroseismology – a branch of astronomy that studies the internal composition of stars using the oscillations of sound waves – and for galactic archaeology, a field that uses detailed stellar fossil records to uncover the history of the universe. 

And though Vrard’s current analysis has come to an end, he aims to build on the scientific community’s knowledge of red-giant stars by examining more precise data that could help cultivate even more refined stellar models. 

This work received support from NASA as well as the European Regional Development Fund.

Awarded to people who show outstanding talent and exceptional creativity in their chosen field, the grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation provides an $800,000 stipend, allotted over the span of five years. 

One of only 25 individuals selected this year to become “excavators of what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood,” Prohira, at 35, is the youngest of this year’s cohort.

“I don't think anyone expects to receive something like this. It's such an unbelievably rare and special thing,“ said Prohira. 

Now an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, Prohira seeks to unravel the mysteries of the universe by creating a new type of observatory for capturing ultra-high energy subatomic particles called neutrinos that can convey important information about some of the most violent places in the universe across time and space. He did much of this work while at Ohio State.

Amy Connolly, a professor of physics at Ohio State, said that Prohira’s research is all about breaking barriers.

“Steven is someone who puts himself out there and says I’m going to try to do something different,” she said. “He went for something that was bold, and that's really important for scientists to feel like they have the freedom to do.”

Connolly said that Prohira’s scientific contributions could one day end up challenging humanity's fundamental understanding of physics.  

During his time as a researcher at Ohio State’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) between 2018 and 2022, Prohira played an essential role in many neutrino-detection experiments. While he was an Ohio State Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar, his work led him to land a National Science Foundation grant and become the study’s principal investigator, a position that was almost unheard of for postdoctoral researchers to receive, said John Beacom, a professor of physics and astronomy. 

Though neutrinos rarely interact with matter, once they meet it creates a shower of energetic particles. Scientists have typically tried to detect neutrinos by locating the radio waves that these showers produce, but Prohira’s hunting method locates neutrinos by detecting injected radio waves that reflect from the shower. 

To prove his technique, Prohira and his colleagues invented a prototype detector called the Radio Echo Telescope (RET), which searches for neutrinos caused by cosmic rays – a form of high-energy radiation that originates outside our solar system. For instance, low-energy cosmic neutrinos are products of high-temperature space events, such as nuclear fusion reactions, a process which powers our sun and many other stars. But Prohira is searching for their high-energy counterparts.  

Prohira also collaborates with James Beatty, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Patrick Allison, a research scientist, both at Ohio State, on developing RET electronics. 

To date, only one telescope has ever observed the highest energy neutrinos in action, The IceCube Neutrino observatory. Located in the South Pole, the particle detector is made entirely of Antarctic ice, and stretches far below the surface, extending to a depth of about 2 miles.

Because Prohira’s project is so ambitious, it'll take a significant amount of funding and  involvement with the scientific community to achieve, Beacom said. But one of the things that makes the MacArthur award so unique, Beacom said, is its “no strings attached” philosophy. In essence, instead of being awarded for a specific project, the money can be spent however the recipient sees fit.

“The MacArthur program is important for identifying and elevating people who are doing important things outside the mainstream,” Beacom said. “These are people trying to change the world in ways that are unexpected, and we couldn't be more proud of Steven.”

Prohira said he is more than eager to be able to continue his research.

“I have a lot of ideas about what’s next and I'm hopeful that I can put the foundation’s support to good use,” Prohira said. 

But while researchers have commonly observed these winds, very little is understood about the mechanism that drives them. Astronomers have long speculated that galactic winds may be driven by nuclear star-forming rings, regions in space that form and contain a large number of stars. Yet in a new paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers were able to construct three-dimensional simulations that uniquely predict the observed morphology of these superwinds. 

According to Dustin Nguyen, lead author of the paper and a graduate student in physics at The Ohio State University, their work shows that the underlying geometric assumptions of where stars release energy is important to understanding galactic evolution. Their research found that starburst rings, instead of spheres, lead to outflows more akin to what is observed in nature. 

“The star-forming cores of galaxies are observed to be non-spherical, so we should model them accordingly,” Nguyen said. 

It also was previously thought that black holes were primarily responsible for the occurrence of gigantic X-ray bubbles, as evidence shows they exist above and below the Milky Way’s disk. Yet the researchers’ study highlights that nuclear star-forming rings can produce qualitatively similar structures. This may be important because the Milky Way also has a ring-like structure called the Central Molecular Zone.

The simulations were created using data generated from a program called Cholla, an open-source computer code that’s been run on some of the largest supercomputers in the world, including those at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, where they created the model.

“Thirty years ago, this kind of computing would have been impossible, but we’re no longer limited by technology,” Nguyen said. “Now we can now study more complicated structures by conducting high-resolution numerical experiments using code optimized for parallel computing.” 

While their findings could have long-standing implications for X-ray astronomy – a branch of science that studies celestial objects by detecting the high levels of X-ray radiation they emit – Nguyen explained that his model is simpler to design than pre-existing models. When designing the parameters of their simulation, Nguyen chose to ignore the additional physics of forces like gravity and magnetic fields, but was still able to generate a model of how a galactic wind operates. 

In the future, Nguyen does plan to recreate the simulations again, but with variables that do account for more complicated physics.  

“It speaks to the efficacy of our work that the model reproduces a lot of the key features in galactic winds,” Nguyen said. “But the next step is to add those additional physics in and see what changes.”

The study’s other co-author was Todd Thompson, a professor in astronomy at Ohio State. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. Evan E. Schneider helped with the Cholla simulations. 

These heavenly bodies were found by The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), a network of 20 telescopes around the world which can observe the entire sky about 50,000 times deeper than the human eye. Researchers from Ohio State have operated the project for nearly a decade.

Now in a paper published on arXiv, an open-access preprint server, researchers describe how they used machine learning techniques to identify and classify variable stars — celestial objects whose brightness waxes and wanes over time, especially if observed from our perspective on Earth.  

The changes these stars undergo can reveal important information about their mass, radius, temperature and even their composition. In fact, even our sun is considered a variable star. Surveys like ASAS-SN are an especially important tool for finding systems that can reveal the complexities of stellar processes, said Collin Christy, the lead author of the paper and an ASAS-SN analyst at Ohio State.

“Variable stars are sort of like a stellar laboratory,” he said. “They’re really neat places in the universe where we can study and learn more about how stars actually work and the little intricacies that they all have.” 

But to locate more of these elusive entities, the team first had to bring in previously unused data from the project. For years, ASAS-SN gazed at the sky using V-band filters, optical lenses that can only identify stars whose light falls into the spectrum of colors visible to the naked eye. But in 2018, the project shifted to using g-band filters — lenses that can detect more varieties of blue light — and the network went from being able to observe about 60 million stars at a time to more than 100 million. 

But unlike ASAS-SN’s citizen science campaign, which relies on volunteers to sift through and classify astronomical data, Christy’s study required the help of artificial intelligence. 

“If you want to look at millions of stars, it’s impossible for a few humans to do it by themselves. It’ll take forever,” said Tharindu Jayasinghe, co-author of the paper, a doctoral student in astronomy and an Ohio State presidential fellow. “So we had to bring something creative into the mix, like machine learning techniques.” 

The new study focused on data from Gaia, a mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our galaxy, as well as from 2MASS and AllWISE. Christy’s team used a machine learning algorithm to generate a list of 1.5 million candidate variable stars from a catalog of about 55 million isolated stars.  

Afterward, researchers whittled the number of candidates down even further. Of the 1.5 million stars they studied, nearly 400,000 turned out to be real variable stars. More than half were already known to the astronomy community, but 116,027 of them proved to be new discoveries. 

Although the study needed machine learning to complete it, Christy’s team says there is still a role for citizen scientists. In fact, volunteers with the citizen science campaign have already started to identify junk data, he said. “Having people tell us what our bad data looks like is super useful, because initially, the algorithm would look at the bad data and try to make sense of it,” Christy said. 

But using a training set of all that bad data allows the team to modify and improve the overall performance of their algorithm. “This is the first time that we’re actually combining citizen science with machine learning techniques in the field of variable star astronomy,” said Jayasinghe. “We’re expanding the boundaries of what you can do when you put those two together.”