NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and UM issued press releases today concerning our new paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, which was also featured in AAS Nova. We used NIRCam on JWST as part of our guaranteed observing time to probe deep in the Flame Nebula, NGC 2024. In the paper, led by former UM grad student Matthew De Furio, we have identified a turn-over in the IMF. Congratulations Matthew!

An international collaboration including U-M researchers Prof. Michael Meyer, former post-doctoral research associates Alex Greenbaum and Gabriele Cugno, as well as former graduate student Matthew De Furio, have used JWST to provide an unprecedented window into the formation of planets around young star systems. More information can be found here.

Rory Bowens successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Using GeoSnap Mid-Infrared Detectors for Exoplanet Research on Large Telescopes” December 19, 2024. He did a fantastic job, including publishing the commissioning paper on the new MIRAC-5 instrument as utilized on the 6.5-meter MMT. Rory led the UM work on this instrument upgrade in our lab, and also coordinated our detector testing for the ESO 39-meter ELT METIS instrument. It is hard to imagine our lab without him. Congratulations Rory! We will keep your Penn State hat and lab coat for you in the lab. We will miss you.

Eshan Raul, a former UM undergraduate (and FEPS team member), who is now a beginning graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Astronomy, recently did an interview describing his work on JWST observations of a steam world, GJ 9827 d. Nice job Eshan!

On December 19, 2024, Rory Bowens successfully defended his PhD in Astronomy at UM. Rory has been a central member of the FEPS team, and in particular the IRIS Lab for the past 5.5 years. Rory played a leading role in our GeoSnap mid-infrared detector testing program, as well as the development and commissioning of the MIRAC-5 camera on the 6.5-meter MMT in Arizona. While Rory will be working with us for a couple more months to wrap up a few things, he will be moving on to join the industrial or government sectors soon. However, his impact will be felt at UM and within FEPS for a very long time. We will miss you Rory. Congratulations on a job well done!

Congratulations to Ryan MacDonald, NASA Sagan Fellow, on his new position as Lecturer in Extra-solar Planets in the School of Physics at St. Andrews University. St. Andrews, third oldest university in the UK (but also the coolest robes – see below), has a dynamic astrophysics group, studying exoplanets, star formation, stellar activity, dark matter, galaxy formation and evolution and other topics. Fortunately for us, Ryan will remain until next spring. Wonderful news!

Image Credit The Herald.

NASA Sagan Fellow, Ryan MacDonald, and former UM undergraduate Eshan Raul, were part of an international team that used the NIRISS instrument on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm the presence of a steam atmosphere on an exoplanet. These results strongly suggest the planet is a so-called “water world” with a mass fraction of water more than x10 that of the Earth (which is about 0.0002 mass fraction water). Water worlds are predicted to be a common outcome of the planet formation process, and observations like these, compared with models can help us figure out how common they might be.

FEPS bids farewell to Gabriele Cugno, who was a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow affiliated with our group for the past two years. Gabriele received a fellowship to return to Switzerland and is now a member of the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Zürich. We continue several collaborations with Gabriele and look forward to his next visit!

M. Meyer and former graduate student M. De Furio were part of a team that recently published results from the JWST NIRISS Instrument Science Team Guaranteed Time Observing program concerning the star-forming region NGC 1333. Using NIRISS, the team used the technique of slitless spectroscopy, imaging the young embedded cluster with a prism that disperse the light from each area of the field into a small spectrum. The survey discovered several planetary-mass objects, one as small as a few Jupiter masses which appears to harbor a gas and dust rich disk which in principle could be forming satellites.

FEPS welcomes Logan Pearce as the inaugural UM ELT Postdoctoral Fellow.  Logan received her PhD at the University of Arizona this past summer.  Her research interests include planet formation and evolution, particularly in binary star systems (including those where one of the members is a white dwarf), through high contrast imaging.  She has also explored future performance of ELTs to detect planets in reflected light.  She also has an interest in outreach, particularly with the student veteran community (she is the founder of the Student Veterans Research Network).