SPACE/COSMOS
How to design a space habitat that supports its residents’ mental health
A new online platform helps engineers look beyond survival mode when designing habitats for extreme living conditions
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Researchers from MIT and other institutions have developed a new interactive online platform called the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas (HECIA) that is a tool for designing habitats in space and other extreme environments that allow crews to not just survive but thrive.
- Users can explore the relationships between aspects of a habitat’s design and an inhabitant’s mental, emotional, and social wellbeing.
Cambridge, Mass. -- In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and post disaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous.
But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission’s success.
Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person’s mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation.
Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat’s layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness.
“The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult,” says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. “We’ve come a long way from the human in a tin can. Asour priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important.”
The insights that Lin’s team presents, which appear today in the journal npj Microgravity, were assembled after an extensive literature search and expert interviews. They identified many studies on habitat design and its influence on specific behaviors, such as how levels of lighting affect an astronaut’s quality of sleep. But this is the first time that anyone has brought such information together, visualizing the relationships and risks associated with a habitat’s design and an inhabitant’s wellbeing.
Lin notes that the work can be applied to designing habitats in not only space but also other extreme, isolated, and confined environments.
“Submarines, oil rigs, polar expeditions, and even refugee camps or war zones are incredibly stressful environments,” says Lin, who is the study’s lead author. “We try to make this work applicable to a lot of scenarios and identify points of intervention in habitat design to reduce stress in those extreme environments.”
The study’s co-authors include former MIT undergraduate Lu Chen and Professor Katya Arquilla of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Other key contributors to the work include Lauren Blackwell Landon at KBR/NASA, Jeffrey Montes of the space architecture firm Different Systems, and MIT undergraduate Kara Chou.
Emotional design
The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of “directed acyclic graphs.” A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes.
A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as “distance from Earth,” to an astronaut’s physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth.
“By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them,” Lin explains. “NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight.”
The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates.
“The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before,” Lin emphasizes. “So we made those connections for the first time.”
To do so, the team first identified habitat design factors and behavioral health outcomes that would be specifically relevant for living in extreme environments. The researchers looked to multiple resources across aerospace and human factors fields. To prioritize a human-centered perspective, they referenced the “Atlas of the Heart,” written by author, social work researcher, and University of Houston Professor Brené Brown. In the book, Brown identifies 87 emotions and experiences that define what makes us human.
“From there, we did a down-selection of which emotions would be the most impactful in our scenario of habitat design in extreme environments,” Lin explains.
The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.
They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance.
Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.
They then developed an online platform, dubbed the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas, or HECIA, as an interactive tool for habitat designers.
Click and connect
When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission.
For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as “distance from Earth,” knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as “food,” “medical capability,” and “family and friends,” and to behavioral health outcomes such as “nostalgia/homesickness.”
A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, “place attachment,” or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as “reconfigurability” and “privacy” — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness.
For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description.
“They may read that research has found ‘access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,’” Lin offers. “So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially.”
They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat’s specifications and constraints.
“Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren’t immediately obvious,” Lin says. “As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive.”
This research was supported, in part, by NASA.
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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News
Journal
npj Microgravity
Article Title
“Interactive causal diagram of habitat design impacts on behavioral health and performance in extreme environments”
Breakthrough in unusual galaxy may help unravel the mystery of dark matter
image:
Hubble Space Telescope image showing the globular cluster stellar stream.
view moreCredit: Hubble Space Telescope and Holm et al. (2026).
In the image above, a faint trail of stars can be seen stretching across the galaxy. These structures, known as globular cluster stellar streams, are coherent stellar structures that retain a record of their dynamical history and can provide unique insights into the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter.
Globular cluster stellar streams offer astronomers a unique opportunity to map otherwise invisible dark matter and study how it behaves. For many years they have been difficult to observe because they are extremely faint. However, advances in large astronomical datasets and sophisticated analysis techniques have recently made stellar streams one of the most promising tools in galactic astronomy.
Now, PhD student Julie Kiel Holm from the Niels Bohr Institute and Associate Professor Sarah Pearson from DTU Space, together with an international team of researchers, have made a discovery that has never been seen before. Their findings have just been published in Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals.
“We have discovered a globular cluster stellar stream in another galaxy. This is the first time such a stream has been observed outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which makes the discovery particularly exciting,” says Julie Kiel Holm.
Globular cluster stellar streams are extremely difficult to detect beyond the Milky Way because their signal is so faint. In this case, the stream was identified in an ultra-diffuse galaxy, a class of galaxies that emit very little light.
It is precisely the combination of these two factors that makes the discovery so remarkable.
“This opens entirely new possibilities. Not only can we now search for globular cluster stellar streams in other galaxies, but in the long term, we may also be able to measure the dark matter content of more ultra-diffuse galaxies,” says co-author Sarah Pearson, who contributed to the discovery during her employment at the Niels Bohr Institute.
A new tool for mapping dark matter
The significance of the discovery lies not only in the detection itself. The researchers also demonstrate, for the first time, that globular cluster stellar streams can be used as a tool for measuring dark matter in galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This is important because dark matter makes up most of the mass in the Universe, yet its nature remains unknown.
“We show that a well-established tool from studies of the Milky Way can be used to understand other galaxies, where measuring the distribution of dark matter has traditionally been very challenging,” says Julie Kiel Holm.
The researchers studied the ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC9050-Dw1 and they present new estimates of how its mass is distributed and how much mass it contains. Their analyses indicate that the galaxy contains large amounts of dark matter, as expected for ultra-diffuse galaxies.
“Our results are consistent with previous studies and what they have shown about dark matter in this ultra-diffuse galaxy. We are measuring it with a completely new tool, demonstrating that this method also works beyond our own galaxy,” says Julie Kiel Holm.
A single discovery could help explain the universe
Although the study focuses on a single galaxy, its broader significance lies in the possibility of gaining a deeper understanding of dark matter itself. By establishing globular cluster stellar streams as a practical tool beyond the Milky Way, researchers may eventually be able to map dark matter across a wide range of galaxy types.
“The insights into dark matter that we have previously been able to gain from globular cluster stellar streams have been limited to a single galaxy – our own. Being able to observe these streams in entirely different kinds of galaxies opens the door to using them to build a much broader understanding of how dark matter behaves,” says Julie Kiel Holm.
With new and upcoming facilities such as the Euclid Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the researchers expect the number of observable globular cluster stellar streams to increase dramatically.
[[ Fact Box 1: What is a globular cluster stellar stream?
A globular cluster stellar stream is a long, narrow stream of stars originating from a globular cluster – a dense, gravitationally bound collection of stars.
The stream forms when the gravitational forces of a host galaxy gradually strip stars from the globular cluster in a process known as tidal stripping.
Because stellar streams are shaped by gravity, astronomers can use them to investigate how mass is distributed within galaxies. They provide valuable information about dark matter, which accounts for approximately 80-85 percent of all matter in the universe but whose nature remains unknown.
Fact Box 2: About the study
The paper reports the first discovery of a globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way.
The researchers also demonstrate how such streams can be used to constrain the dark matter halo mass and dark matter density profile of external galaxies.
The study has been published in Nature.
The following authors contributed to the study: Julie Kiel Holm, Sarah Pearson, Jacob Nibauer, David J. Sand, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, Tjitske Starkenburg, David Hendel and Catherine Fielder.
The study is funded by the Villum Foundation and the European Research Council. ]]
Journal
Nature
Article Title
Evidence for the first globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way'
Article Publication Date
12-Aug-2026
Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star
The mashup of a black hole and an enormous star has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep-space images
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
image:
Astronomers have discovered a “black hole star,” an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object. It resembles an enormous star, but its energy production is closer to what a black hole might generate.
view moreCredit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT
- Astronomers have discovered a “black hole star,” an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object.
- It resembles an enormous star, but its energy production is closer to what a black hole might generate.
- This finding could help solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken to date.
Cambridge, Mass. -- Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.
The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”
In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.
“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”
If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.
“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”
The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.
A singular source
Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.
“There’s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,” Naidu says. “What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’”
As they looked through JWST’s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.
“When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” Simcoe explains. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.”
But there were other signatures in the light that didn’t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared.
This spectral drop-off is known as a “Balmer break” — a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern.
“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Naidu says. “But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.”
What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.
Pure light
To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.
“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Simcoe says. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.”
Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.
“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu says. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”
Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole’s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated “black hole star” with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.
From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.
The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1.
“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu says. “But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”
This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Department of Physics, NASA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News
Journal
Nature
Article Title
“A Gas Enshrouded and Gas Reddened Black Hole at Cosmic Dawn”
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