From Founder to Byline: FCAD Spotlight Creator’s First Published Story
Moiz Khalil ('24), a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins Science Writing program, makes his debut with a story on a possible ammonia signature on Europa.
When Moiz Khalil (Class of 2024) started the Five College Astronomy Department (FCAD) Scholars Spotlight as a senior astronomy major, it was meant to be a training ground: a way to build a science-writing portfolio while giving early-career astronomers at UMass a platform to explain their research to a general audience. Two years and dozens of profiles later, that portfolio has done its job. Khalil graduated from the Master of Arts in Science Writing program at Johns Hopkins University in May 2026, and this June he published his first byline as a science journalist.
His story, "Has Ammonia Been Found on Europa?", ran June 22 in The Science Writer, a magazine produced by the Johns Hopkins program. It covers a reanalysis of decades-old Galileo spacecraft data by planetary scientist Al Emran, now at Blue Origin, who identified a faint chemical signature in the images that may indicate ammonia on Jupiter's moon Europa. If confirmed, the finding would suggest Europa's subsurface ocean is more chemically active, and therefore more hospitable to life, than previously known. Khalil's piece also brings in a skeptical counterpoint from Richard Cartwright of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who argues the same signal could instead come from ordinary salt. Looking ahead, NASA's Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Juice missions, both en route to the Jovian system, could settle this question within the decade.
It's a fitting first publication for a writer who cut his teeth explaining dusty, distant galaxies to non-experts at UMass. Khalil founded the FCAD Spotlight in Spring 2024 under the mentorship of Professors Kate Whitaker (UMass) and Kim Ward-Duong (Smith), profiling researchers from undergraduates to postdocs. He graduated with a degree in astronomy and headed to Johns Hopkins to further develop his craft. The initiative he started at UMass is now carried forward by a new generation of student writers. Khalil built this program to launch his own career, and it lives on now by launching others.
UMass Amherst post-baccalaureate finds that galaxy properties from visible-light data remain largely robust even when hidden dust emission is included.
Using JWST to study dust-obscured galaxies halfway back to cosmic noon – and finding what slowed the Universe’s star formation.
Miriam Eleazer, an astronomical spectroscopist and a fourth year graduate student at UMass Amherst is trying to solve a mystery: ten billion years ago, the Universe experienced a “cosmic noon”; a peak in star formation.
Observations indicate massive galaxies may complete star formation and chemical enrichment well before cosmic noon.
One of the central questions in galaxy evolution is how massive galaxies can stop forming stars so early in cosmic time, when the Universe is still rich in cold gas, the raw fuel for new star formation. A study led by Massi Hamadouche, a postdoctoral scholar at UMass Amherst, examines James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spectroscopic data of ten such massive galaxies that have shut down star formation, often referred to as quiescent galaxies. Her work shows that these galaxies can form, evolve, and quench so rapidly that they complete this lifecycle well before the cosmic peak of star formation and galaxy evolution – a result that stands in tension with theoretical predictions.
Examining how galaxy morphology impacts accretion
One of the central open questions in galaxy evolution is how their central super massive black holes (SMBH) begin accreting matter. Will Jarvis, a first-year PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is taking a direct approach to solving this problem by testing whether galaxy mergers trigger black hole activity. The idea is intuitive: major mergers can strongly disturb a galaxy, redistributing stars, gas, and dust in ways that funnel material towards the center, driving black holes to begin to “eat”. Yet despite this expectation, Jarvis’s results suggest that mergers may not be the dominant mechanism fueling central black holes.
Using a multiwavelength approach to determine star formation rates in spiral arms
Spiral galaxies, with their sweeping arms, have long been thought to be stellar nurseries. But new research led by UMass Amherst PhD student Bingqing Sun suggests these spiral arms may not trigger star formation – they may simply gather the raw material, gas and dust, needed to form stars. For Sun, tackling this question meant rethinking how star formation is measured, using a new approach that combines observations across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Using clustering of star clusters to measure underlying gas and dust distributions in galaxies.
From spiral to dwarf galaxies alike, newborn star clusters appear to arrange themselves according to the same underlying physics. Drew Lapeer, a second-year PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has recently published a first-author paper on using star clustering to trace the underlying distribution of gas associated with emerging young star clusters.
The most overdense regions of our universe today host compact conglomerations of galaxies. If we look back in time using telescopes, we can find the cosmic megastructure "babies" that will eventually mature into the galaxy clusters we see today. In a paper published to the Astrophysical Journal in November 2023, Roxana Popescu, a fifth year graduate student at UMass Amherst, investigates distant and rare protocluster candidates using observations from space telescopes like WISEand Herschel.
Studying the distant universe is extremely challenging – observing the most distant galaxies requires powerful telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, owing to their extraordinary faintness. Dr. John Weaver and his team of international collaborators have been working tirelessly to classify ~60,000 galaxies, including some of the most distant known galaxies, in a paper that was published to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in December 2023
Galaxies come in all different shapes and sizes and their properties dramatically evolve over cosmic time. A wide swath of these galaxies also shut down their star formation over 10 billion years ago. The lowest mass dead galaxies remain essentially unexplored at these early times, owing to their extreme faintness. In a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Sam Cutler, a fifth year graduate student at UMass, uncovers two distinct classes of dead galaxies while studying the relation between galaxy size and mass using new data from the James Webb Space Telescope