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This schematic shows the various ejecta and winds (red and purple) given off by the exploding star (left, yellow). The common-envelope disk (blue) surrounds both stars, the one exploding as a supernova and its binary partner (not shown). The boundary layer around the common-envelope disk is the source of the hydrogen the team detected. (credit: B. Thomas et al./UT Austin)  

NASA has selected 24 new Fellows for its prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA Astrophysics. Fellows are named corresponding to three broad scientific questions NASA seeks to answer about the universe: How does the universe work? – Einstein Fellows; How did we get here? – Hubble Fellows; Are we alone? – Sagan Fellows.

Dr. Stella Offner, Associate Professor of astronomy, receives the Delta Young Astronomer Lectureship Award on March 15, 2022. (Delta Electronics Foundation)

The new Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve covers 15,000 square miles in west Texas and northern Mexico. It is the world's largest International Dark Sky Reserve. (Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory)

Businesses and organizations recognized through McDonald Observatory's Night Sky Friendly Lighting program will receive this poster to display at their site, as well as window decals. (credit: McDonald Observatory)

UT Austin astronomers Anna Schauer, Niv Drory, and Volker Bromm are advocating the revival of the lunar liquid mirror telescope project orginally proposed in 2008 by Roger Angel and collaborators. The Texas group advocates that rather than have a 20-meter liquid mirror (shown), the size be increased to 100 meters so that the telescope can study the first stars that formed in the universe, the so-called Population III stars. They have dubbed this facility the 'Ultimately Large Telescope.' (credit: Roger Angel et al./Univ. of Arizona)

A newly characterized sub-Neptune-sized planet, named K2-25b, orbits a low-mass star in the Hyades cluster, a cluster of young stars about 150 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. The detailed characterization sheds light on how such planets form and evolve. Credit: Gudmundur Stefansson

This schematic of the proposed mechanism shows a cutaway view of a young star and the disk of gas surrounding it, in which planets may form. The gas parcel Offner's team modeled is depicted as a cluster of red dots. The 'inner disk' is the region from the star out to Earth's distance from the Sun (1 Astronomical Unit, or about 93 million miles). Some fraction of the enriched outflow gas may fall onto the disk where the cosmic ray irradiation is weak. Regions I and II denote different regions of cosmic ray transport. Credit: Brandt Gaches et al./Univ. of Cologne

A comparison of Earth and Kepler-1649c, an exoplanet only 1.06 times Earth's radius. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter