Highlights

January 2024. Irradiation-driven atmospheric escape from close-in white dwarf planets

December 2023. 50MGC: a new (and better) catalog of nearby galaxies, led by Utah Univ. grad student David Ohlson

October 2023. ATES looks at metastable helium absorption by transiting exoplanets

August 2023. The X-Ray Binary-star Cluster Connection in Late-type Galaxies - latest ApJ paper by UM grad Qiana Hunt

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/12184/2628689/ANDES-the-high-resolution-spectrograph-for-the-ELT--science/10.1117/12.2628689.full#_=_

April 2022. Evidence for the destruction of thousands of stars by massive black holes unvailed  by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This study was led by Dr Vivienne Baldassare - PhD 2017 from U-M - now a faculty member at Washington State. Below are the link from some of the press releases:

Black Holes Raze Thousands of Stars to Fuel Growth

Astronomers identify likely location of medium-sized black holes

Buchi neri intermedi e dove trovarli

December 2021. ATES takes 2: Irradiation-driven escape of primordial planetary atmospheres II. Evaporation efficiency of sub-Neptunes through hot Jupiters

August 2021. Welcome to ATES, a new, publicly available, 1D radiation hydrodynamic code to model irradiation-driven atmospheric escape of hot exoplanets. The code is described in this A&A paper.

July 2021. Old dog, new tricks: Proof of CMB-driven X-ray brightening of high-z radio galaxies

November 2020. The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", and to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."

June 2020. Read about MAXI J1820's X-ray jets in the New York Times: Watch This Black Hole Blow Bubbles

March 2020. The full life cycle of a relativistic jet is revealed in our Nature Astronomy study, led by Oxford grad Joe Bright:

An extremely powerful long-lived superluminal ejection from the black hole MAXI J1820+070.

Below are the links to some of the press releases:

Shedding new light on black hole ejections

Black hole's ejections are tracked by new telescope observations

Astronomers get the whole film of how a black hole ejects matter and interacts with the medium

December 2019. Watch Black holes: Facts, Myths and Mysteries. An hour-long journey into the fascinating world of black holes. Featured as part of the UofM Saturday Morning Physics Series.
July 23, 2019. NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary.

June 2019. Find out about the 10,000 solar mass black hole at the center of the nearby, bulgeless dwarf galaxy NGC4395 on our Nature Astronomy paper today. Read the "Behind the paper" blog here.

April 10, 2019. The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration releases the first image of a black hole shadow, around the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87.

March 2019. Towards a high accuracy measurement of the local black hole occupation fraction in low mass galaxies, a White Paper submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey

January 6-10, 2019. It's UM feast at the 2019 AAS: Prof Ted Bergin is awarded the 2019 Heineman Prize for Astrophysics "for his pioneering work in astrochemistry"; Prof John Monnier is awarded the 2019 Weber award for Astronomical Instrumentation, for "his pioneering work in high-angular-resolution studies with long-baseline optical interferometry".

September 1, 2018. Pre-candidate students Qiana Hunt and Kate Napier join the group.

October 16, 2017. The first neutron star-neutron star merger, with electromagnetic counterpart (!) is announced by the LIGO collaboration.

October 3, 2017. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 is awarded to Rainer Weiss,  Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

May 16, 2017. Congratulations Dr Baldassare! Starting in September, Vivienne is going to be an Einstein Fellow at Yale.

June 15, 2016. The LIGO collaboration announces the detection of a second black hole-black hole merger. Here is a link to the press release.

March 30, 2016. Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell receives the Orren C. Mohler Prize from UM Astronomy for excellence in research in astronomy and astrophysics. Her Mohler lecture celebrates the contributions of some remarkable female astronomers.

March 2, 2016. Vivienne Baldassare is awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.

Feb 11, 2016. the LIGO collaboration announces the detection of gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes! Here is a link to the PRL discovery paper, and the LIGO press release.

Sept 3, 2015. Registrations are now open to contribute to the X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer (XIPE) science case, selected by ESA for a phase-A study

Sept 1, 2015. Adi Foord joins the group as a first yr grad student.

Aug 11, 2015. Vivienne's discovery of a 50,000 solar mass black hole highlighted in the press:

Oxymoronic Black Hole Provides Clues to Growth

The Hunt for the Smallest Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers discover the smallest known supermassive black hole

Teeny Supermassive Black Hole

Tiniest Monster Black Hole Discovered

Not so supermassive after all!

Aug 1, 2015. Dr Jianfeng Wu (PhD from Penn State in 2010)  joins the group as Postdoctoral researcher.