Scientists are getting closer every day to getting the best view yet of alien worlds, thanks to years of dedicated work by several missions in which the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU Boulder was involved.

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In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Jeremy Darling, professor in the Department of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences, jumps into “What is the biggest thing in the universe?” And stay tuned for “What is the smallest thing in the universe?”

The vastness of space can be hard to wrap your head around.

Say you are an ordinary beam of light blazing through space at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. It would take you 8 minutes and 20 seconds to make it from the sun to Earth—an impressive distance of 94 million miles. It would take almost an entire day to travel between Earth and NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth.

That’s far, but nothing compared to the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy, which contains something around 100 billion stars. Light crosses from one edge of this expanse to the other over a staggering 100,000 years.

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And this distance is only the tip of a very, very big iceberg, according to Darling. He’s a cosmologist who studies large things, from the evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way to how black holes can bend space and time.

“I really like big questions,” he said. “It's amazing to me that a person can say something new about the universe after working on it for only a few years.”

Darling explained that the universe has a structure that goes way beyond individual galaxies. Just after the Big Bang, he said, the universe wasn’t completely homogenous. Some regions of space were a little denser with matter than others. Over time, those dense areas got denser, while the less dense areas became even more sparse—a bit like milk separating into curds and whey. Eventually, the cosmos formed a pattern like a web. Galaxies tend to cluster into long strands, or filaments, that surround relative empty patches of space known as voids.

“The filaments are the most massive structures in the universe, especially at the points where they meet, which are called clusters or superclusters,” Darling said.

So how big is one of these galactic clumps? The Milky Way sits in what scientists call the Laniakea Supercluster, named after the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.” This supercluster boasts around 100,000 galaxies, some much larger than our own, and extends around 520 million light-years across. Put differently, light has been traveling across this expanse for almost as long as animals with backbones have lived on Earth.

In his own research, Darling has tracked the evolution of such superclusters. He’s developed new methods to, for example, observe galaxies falling out of voids and into the denser filaments.

But you might not want to get used to them, at least on cosmic time scales. The universe, Darling said, is expanding at an accelerating pace due to a mysterious force known as dark energy.

“Dark energy, if it keeps going, will start pulling stuff apart that we would have otherwise thought would remain together,” he said.

Even the biggest things in the universe, it turns out, are no match for time. 

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Today’s weather report on Mars: Windy with a chance of catastrophic dust storms blotting out the sky.

In a new study, planetary scientists at CU Boulder have begun to unravel the factors that kick off major dust storms on Mars—weather events that sometimes engulf the entire planet in swirling grit. The team discovered that relatively warm and sunny days may help to trigger them.

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Heshani Pieris, lead author of the study, said the findings are a first step toward forecasting extreme weather on Mars, just like scientists do on Earth.

“Dust storms have a significant effect on rovers and landers on Mars, not to mention what will happen during future crewed missions to Mars,” said Pieris, a graduate student at the (LASP) at CU Boulder. “This dust is very light and sticks to everything.”

She will at the in Washington.

To put dust storms under the magnifying glass, the researchers drew on real observations from NASA’s satellite.

So far, they have identified weather patterns that may underly roughly two-thirds of the major dust storms on Mars. You won’t see Mars weather reporters standing in front of a green screen just yet, but it’s a step in the right direction, said study co-author Paul Hayne.

“We need to understand what causes some of the smaller or regional storms to grow into global-scale storms,” said Hayne, a researcher at LASP and associate professor at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “We don’t even fully understand the basic physics of how dust storms start at the surface.”

Dusty demise

Dust storms on Mars are something to behold.

Many begin as smaller storms that swirl around the ice caps at the planet’s north and south poles, usually during the second half of the Martian year. (A year on Mars lasts 687 Earth days). Those storms can grow at a furious pace, pressing toward the equator until they cover millions of square miles and last for days.

The 2015 film The Martian starring Matt Damon featured one such apocalyptic storm that knocked over a satellite dish and tossed around astronauts. The reality is less cinematic. Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, so dust storms on the Red Planet can’t generate much force. But they can still be trouble.

In 2018, for example, a global dust storm buried the solar panels on NASA’s Opportunity rover under a layer of dust. The rover died not long after.

“Even though the wind pressure may not be enough to knock over equipment, these dust grains can build up a lot of speed and pelt astronauts and their equipment,” Hayne said.

Hot spells

In the current study, Pieris and Hayne set their sights on two weather patterns that tend to occur every year on Mars known as “A” and “C” storms.

The team pored over observations of Mars from the Mars Climate Sounder instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter over eight Mars years (15 years on Earth). In particular, Pieris and Hayne looked for periods of unusual warmth—or weeks when more sunlight filtered through Mars’ thin atmosphere and baked the planet’s surface.

They discovered that roughly 68% of major storms on the planet were preceded by a sharp rise in temperatures at the surface. In other words, the planet heated up, then a few weeks later, conditions got dusty.

“It’s almost like Mars has to wait for the air to get clear enough to form a major dust storm,” Hayne said.

The team can’t prove that those balmy conditions actually cause the dust storms. But, Pieris said, similar phenomena trigger storms on Earth. During hot summers in Boulder, Colorado, for example, warm air near the ground can rise through the atmosphere, often forming those towering, gray clouds that signal rain.

“When you heat up the surface, the layer of atmosphere right above it becomes buoyant, and it can rise, taking dust with it,” Pieris said.

She and Hayne are now gathering observations from more recent years on Mars to continue to explore these explosive weather patterns. Eventually, they’d like to get to the point where they can look at live data coming from the Red Planet and predict what could happen in the weeks ahead.

“This study is not the end all be all of predicting storms on Mars,” Pieris said. “But we hope it’s a step in the right direction.”

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Dezell Turner slips on a set of sleek augmented reality goggles in the lobby of the Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building. Behind him stretches a floor-to-ceiling mural of space—a deep blue sky dotted with constellations and the cloudy shape of the Milky Way.

In his Microsoft HoloLens headset, however, Turner is experiencing a different kind of outer space.

Turner, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences and Smead Scholar at CU Boulder, waives his hands in front of him and pinches his fingers. Inside the headset, which only he can see, curving red and yellow lines appear. They join two dots, one representing Earth and the other the moon. With a few swipes, the lines shift, transforming from a relatively simple arc to more complicated curls and loop-de-loops.

It looks like a more dizzying version of directions you might follow on your phone during a road trip.

“This is like a holographic Google Maps for planning space missions,” he said.

The new tool, which Turner developed working under advisor Jay McMahon, projects various paths a spacecraft could take to get to the moon through what scientists call “cislunar” space. He named the software ASTROMECH, a nod to a class of droids in the Star Wars franchise.

Turner’s work arrives as the moon is having a moment. NASA’s plans to land humans on the lunar surface sometime this decade. Other entities, including a growing number of private companies, have their eyes set on space. Turner hopes that his AR tool will help some of those groups plan out their missions—picking routes and weighing factors like speed versus fuel cost.

For the budding aerospace engineer, the project is a chance to make the technology from some of his favorite movies a reality. Picture the scene in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens in which a droid projects a holographic map that will lead the characters to the location of a missing hero.

“When R2D2 projects the map to Luke Skywalker, we’re creating a real-world version of that that’s hopefully just as intuitive to use,” Turner said.

Miniature planetarium

Turner, who’s 24, has loved space for as long as he can remember. When he was 4 years old, his parents bought him a projector that displayed a star map on the ceiling of his bedroom. He spent so long staring at the projection that he memorized many of the constellations.

But space is a lot more complicated than movies or his bedroom planetarium might make it seem. In Star Wars, if Han Solo needs to get somewhere, he just points the Millennium Falcon in the right direction and goes. In reality, spacecraft leaving Earth’s orbit are caught in the push and pull between the planet and its moon.

“Your trajectories aren’t always going to be traditional shapes like ellipses and circles,” Turner said. “Spacecraft may take all sorts of weird paths, and that can become very mathematically complicated.”

In 1969, for example, Apollo 11 took a relatively direct route to the moon, arriving in an orbit close to the lunar surface in about three days. More recently, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, which launched in 2022 with no humans aboard, made a more circuitous pass. The mission’s Orion space capsule first circled the moon, using its gravity to slingshot roughly 40,000 miles out into space. That trip took five days.

Turner explained that some small aerospace companies may not have employees versed in those kinds of gravitational intricacies. ASTROMECH does the math for them.

“The ways in which Dezell is leveraging AR in designing ASTROMECH has the potential to make cislunar trajectory design much more understandable for most people in the industry,” said McMahon, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “This could be hugely beneficial for training new employees and increasing small companies' ability to operate spacecraft in cislunar space.”

Alternate routes available

Back in the aerospace lobby, Turner demonstrates how he can pinch and swipe to compare those different routes.

Currently, the tool only tabulates fairly simple trajectories, similar to the direct path Apollo 11 took to the moon. But Turner would like to eventually add in more complicated routes. They include ones that take advantage of “Lagrange points,” or special spots in space where gravitational forces allow spacecraft to, essentially, park. The tool also includes an estimate for what aerospace engineers call delta-V, a calculation that roughly captures how much fuel a spacecraft will need to burn making maneuvers. Do you want to get to the moon fast and spend a bit more money or take your time and save on fuel?

Turner has a lot more work to do before aerospace companies can begin using ASTROMECH. One day, he envisions laying out trajectories for undertaking journeys even deeper into the solar system.

For now, he’s happy to have space at his fingerprints—just like Rey gazing at R2D2’s map.

“Getting to wear the headset really makes my day, especially when I’ve been fighting bugs in my code,” Turner said. “Getting to play with holograms makes me feel like a little kid.”

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In a new study, a team of astrophysicists led by CU Boulder has set out to unravel the mysteries of UFOs—not the alien spacecraft, but a class of unusually large and red galaxies that researchers have nicknamed Ultra-red Flattened Objects, or UFOs for short.

The research shines a spotlight on some strange galaxies, said Justus Gibson, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. CU Boulder researchers first discovered UFO galaxies in images from the (JWST).

Now, Gibson and his colleagues think they know more about the galaxies’ inner workings.

The researchers explained that UFOs are odd cosmic ducks for various reasons. For starters, they reside near the limit of how far earlier space instruments, like the Hubble Space Telescope, could peer into the universe. But Hubble had completely missed them because these galaxies emit very little visible light.

The new study relies on observations from the Webb telescope, a pioneering spacecraft that launched in December 2021. Drawing on those images and computer simulations, the team reports that UFO galaxies seem to be similar in size and shape to the Milky Way. But these new galaxies are much dustier.

The team in The Astrophysical Journal.

“JWST allows us to see this type of galaxy that we never would have been able to see before,” Gibson said. “It tells us that maybe we didn't understand the universe as well as we thought.”

The universe is turning out to be more interesting than some scientists assumed, said study co-author Erica Nelson, .

“They’re so visually striking,” said Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics at CU Boulder. “They’re enormous red discs that pop up in these images, and they were totally unexpected. They make you say: ‘What? How?’”

Hidden galaxies

Gibson noted that UFO galaxies look red because they emit very little visible light—most of the light that escapes these galaxies is infrared radiation, and what little visible light they emit is at the limit of what human eyes can see (red, in other words). As a result, the UFO galaxies were all but invisible to Hubble, which only records visible light. The Webb telescope, in contrast, collects infrared light, which means it’s well-suited to spotting these kinds of objects.

“Prior to the launch of James Webb, we thought we would find really, really far away galaxies,” Gibson said. “But we thought that closer to us, we already had a pretty good understanding of all the types of galaxies there are.”

In the new study, Gibson and his colleagues drew on observations from a collaboration called the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). In all, the team identified 56 UFO galaxies in images from JADES.

They found a lot of dust.

Biting the dust

The researchers noted that all galaxies, and even Earth’s solar system, contain interplanetary dust, the remnants of dying stars that exploded a long time ago, shooting tiny particles of metal far into space. But the UFO galaxies contain a lot more dust than the Milky Way—enough dust to block about 50 times more light from beaming into space. It’s a bit like a sandstorm on Earth obscuring the sun.

The researchers also used computer simulations, or models, to understand how the galaxies are shaped. Gibson noted that galaxies can come in many shapes and sizes, from Frisbee-like discs to football shapes and spheres.

The team’s calculations suggest that UFO galaxies may be shaped like run-of-the-mill discs (think Milky Way).

“You have these big bad disks—like our home, the Milky Way—flying around space, completely invisible to us,” Nelson said.

How these galaxies got so dusty isn’t clear. Nelson said she hopes that by studying them, astrophysicists can learn how galaxies grow and form new stars over time. For now, the UFOs raise a lot more questions than answers.

“Why on Earth do these galaxies have so much more dust than all the other galaxies?” she said. “Got me.”

Other co-authors on the new study include researchers from the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh, University of Massachusetts, Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, European Space Agency, University of Melbourne, Sorbonne University, University of Hertfordshire, University of Arizona, The Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Santa Cruz and NRC Herzberg.

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In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Katya Arquilla, assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, looks into the question: “Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars?”

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In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded the International Space Station (ISS), expecting a week-long stay in orbit. Now, they won’t return to Earth until February after a series of technical issues plagued the Boeing Starliner space capsule they rode into space on.

If spending eight months on the ISS, which measures just 5,000 square feet, sounds like a recipe for frayed nerves, it may very well be. That’s according to Arquilla, an engineer who has studied how long space journeys can affect the mental health of humans.  

“On long-duration space missions, there are many stressors that create the potential for negative mental health effects,” she said. “From data taken in research facilities in extreme environments on Earth, like Antarctica, we have seen symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

A future mission to Mars, however, could be a lot more than eight months, potentially as much as three years. Which raises the question: Can humans handle that much time in space?

Arquilla thinks so, but there are caveats.

“It will be a big challenge,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know because we haven’t sent people to Mars before. They won’t be able to look down and see the Earth the way they can on the International Space Station.”

In previous research, Arquilla and her colleagues explored the mental health consequences of that kind of isolation through an unlikely event here on Earth—the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2020, millions of Americans were suddenly cooped up in their homes with the threat of a major disease hanging over their heads. The researchers conducted a survey and observed that people with military training or other experience in stressful environments tended to be more productive during the pandemic than others. But those experienced individuals didn’t appear to maintain their mental health better than less experienced people.

Arquilla noted that simply being aware of your own body, and knowing when stress sets in, can help. She has partnered with Laura Devendorf, a researcher at CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute, to assist people in doing that kind of monitoring. The team integrated sensors into comfortable textiles that track electrocardiogram (ECG) signals coming from wearers’ hearts.

“Maybe I'm an astronaut on a mission and I'm tracking my own signals, and I see that my heartrate starts to go up,” Arquilla said. “I could decide based on that that I should take a break for a couple of hours.”

This research won’t just help astronauts. Arquilla is also exploring how similar technologies could give people on the ground tools to detect and manage symptoms of mental health changes in high-stress environments. That might include wilderness expeditions, remote research facilities and military deployments.  

She’s glad to see people talking more about mental health, both on Earth and in space.

“We all, after the pandemic, understand the importance of mental health a lot more than we did maybe 10 years ago,” she said. “Being able to recognize that it's okay to not feel at 100% all the time, and being able to give people the tools they need to articulate what is wrong, is really important.”

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