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The Moving Universe Lab

New paper alert: A Reanalysis of the Isolated Black Hole Candidate OGLE-2011-BLG-0462/MOA-2011-BLG-191 (Lam and Lu 2023)

New paper alert: An Optical Distortion Solution for the Keck I OSIRIS Imager (Freeman, Lu, Lyke et al. 2023)

New paper alert: Stellar Populations in the Central 0.5 pc of Our Galaxy III: The Dynamical Sub-structures (Jia, Xu, Lu et al. 2023)

New paper alert: 60 Microlensing Events from the Three Years of Zwicky Transient Facility Phase One (Medford, Abrams, Lu et al. 2023)

What do we do?

The Moving Universe Lab is led by Prof. Jessica Lu at UC Berkeley and focuses on the study of stars and black holes in the nearby universe. We conduct a search for free-floating stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way using photometric and astrometric microlensing. We are also work on new adaptive optics systems that correct image blurring from the Earth's atmosphere due to turbulence near the ground. We also study how star formation changes in extreme environments such as in massive young clusters and the Galactic Center. These areas of research require high-precision astrometry and high resolution infrared images from space telescopes and ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO).

Instrumentation

  • Keck Adaptive Optics

  • Ultra Wide Field Adaptive Optics

  • Roman Space Telescope

  • CubeSats

  • AIROPA

Education and Outreach

Lab Members

Codes, Tools and Resources

Our lab produces a number of publicly available codes and tools.

Funding Acknowledgments

We are grateful that this work is supported by funds, grants, and awards from: UC Berkeley, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation.