"Ten years ago, scientists heard the universe rumble for the first time. That first discovery of gravitational waves began a new era of astronomy." @simon-stevenson.bsky.social writes about gravitational-wave astronomy today theconversation.com/10-years-ago... #GW10Years 🔭🧪⚛️ 🖼️: C Knox

My cake decorating skills aren't quite there yet, BUT a HUGE congratulations to @astroteagan.bsky.social for submitting her PhD.

Congratulations to OzGrav's Deputy Director, Professor Tamara Davis AM, recipient of the 2025 Moyal Medal awarded by Macquarie University for her outstanding contributions to astrophysics and cosmology. Read more here: lighthouse.mq.edu.au/media-releas...

Front page news! 📰 Monash PhD researcher Christian Adamcwicz leads new LVK results revealing the mysterious 40 M☉ gap in black hole populations. Exciting clues about how the universe’s heaviest stars live and die! #BlackHoles #LVK #Astrophysics www.theaustralian.com.au/science/grav...

Look at 'em all! It's like a big blue Phoenix rising from the ashes of a sea of massive compact objects that slammed together to shake the very fabric of the cosmos! 👀👀👀 🔭

2 years into my long covid journey. Finding it very difficult to do science at the level I’d like 🫠

Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today! We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discoveries of black holes and neutron stars 📰 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #GWTC4

The O4a results (GWTC-4) of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA are now out 🥳 We have 128 new candidates of which 86 have a false alarm rate of less this 1 per year The new catalog results arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 Update on black hole and neutron star population arxiv.org/abs/2508.18083

The results of the 4th Gravitational Wave observing run are out! 👀 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18080, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18081, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18083, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18079

A fun project I worked on during the weekend .... I made a new pulsar map! The one used in the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts uses slower and less stable pulsars. This one uses millisecond pulsars! Might make a few more changes to it. Also thanks to folks who gave feedback on v1.0. #Pulsars 🔭📡

An international research team led by @astrosanne.bsky.social at ASTRON, identify a mystifying Long-Period Transient with 100% polarized radio emission, suggesting new type of cosmic radio source: www.astron.nl/astronomers-...

Congrats to Natasha Van Bemmel on winning an MNRAS Student Prize. The MNRAS editors selected her first‑author paper, An Optically Led Search for Kilonovae to z~0.3 with KNTraP, as one of six best student‑led publications this year, what a debut! #OzGrav #Swinburne #MNRAS #NatashaVanBemmel

It's a 'no' from me dawg

GW231123: Heaviest black‑hole merger yet detected in gravitational waves. ~100 M☉ + ~140 M☉ → ~225 M☉ remnant, spins near physical limit. “This blip forces us to rethink how very heavy, rapidly spinning black holes come to be.” – Prof Eric Thrane Read: www.ozgrav.org/news/ligo-de...

Unsolved Physics Problems xkcd.com/3115/

The @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration is happy to announce the detection of the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves 🕳️🕳️

In this morning’s plenary at #GR24Amaldi16, Amanda Farah introduces the newest (and most massive and likely most rapidly spinning) @ligo.org - @egovirgo.bsky.social - KAGRA event, #GW231123! Read more about this exceptional event in the discovery paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.08219

Great talk from Lia Medeiros on the event horizon telescope results! Black hole shadows were not something I had thought much about before, it kinda feels like the Universe is putting on a shadow puppet show 🕳️💫 @ioppublishing.bsky.social

🔊 Two really massive black holes, COLLIDING💥! LIGO has seen ~300 of these collisions since 2015, but this one is HUGE creating a black hole 256x the mass of the Sun. It's likely the merging black holes were themselves the by-product of previous mergers 🤓🔭🧪 ℹ️: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes

Water Balloons xkcd.com/3061

Vera Rubin has been selected to be featured on the back of a quarter. She is the first astronomer to be honored this way. Read about her research on the Andromeda galaxy and how it led to the discovery of dark matter in this article written by Rubin herself. doi.org/10.1063/1.24... 🔭 #WomenInStem

I just updated my website. Check out the resources on there, including how to make nice FREE websites and how to make nice posters. rowina-n.github.io

Important education happening here #dachshund #ai

For a while I had a gig answering astronomy questions online. When I got "what is that bright thing I saw in the sky?" questions, I'd guess "Venus" and then go look it up, putting their location, and the time, and direction of the observation into Stellarium. 98% of the time that guess was right.

Water can be Kiki or Bouba @plasky.bsky.social, just like cosmic variance

2025 challenge: Astronomers stop renaming things that already exist in math/stats

Monash University takes all three prizes at the OzGrav bingo ice breaker activity at the 2024 retreat! @ozgrav.bsky.social

Coverage in The SMH! www.smh.com.au/national/a-s...

It's going to be one of those days... Anyone able to help me fix the mess I made on the supercomputer with apptainer?

I made this website for the MeerKAT PTA. Check it out! mpta-gw.github.io

Exciting news! Monash University’s, Rowina Nathan, has authored a groundbreaking study using the powerful MeerKAT telescope to create the most detailed map of the gravitational wave background to date: shorturl.at/KRXKj Check out an article on Rowina’s work: shorturl.at/oS3G1

All of these #pulsar conversations going on, on here, and I am not only here for it, but I am planting seeds left, right and centre to watch the pulsar talk sprout like a wild forest on here. Not even sorry!

Jump scare from page 11 of our paper 👻 We included this derivation so no one else has to endure the pain of doing it themselves, you're welcome world.

Here's the research! academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc... academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc... academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc... (This one led by @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social and Kathrin Grunthal!) And here's a @theconversation.com article I wrote about it! theconversation.com/to-map-the-v...

And the noise analysis and gravitational wave background analysis lead by @astromattmiles.bsky.social academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc... academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc...

Here is the gravitational wave background mapping paper academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc...

If you want to hear more about this fascinating field of science check out this week's episode of @scienceactually.bsky.social's The Nerd & The Scientist where we chat with @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social about all things related to pulsars, gravitational waves, and space 🔭⚛️🧪 rss.com/podcasts/the...

MeerKAT's excellent sensitivity gives us the most detailed map of the GWB - and an interesting feature has appeared! @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social from @monashastro.bsky.social / @ozgrav.bsky.social discusses these findings. www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/mapp... 📸 R. Nathan #SpaceAustralia

Read our conversation article here! @astromattmiles.bsky.social theconversation.com/to-map-the-v...

THE RESULTS ARE HERE! We mapped the gravitational wave background and found some cool stuff! We found a bright spot in the Southern Hemisphere, with low statistical significance. Is it a statistical anomaly or something more interesting?? Paper links to come

astronomers often borrow language from other fields to describe new discoveries. When we find known objects behaving weirdly, we often call them "exotic". This is what I think of when somebody says "exotic star"

What generates the gravitational waves that make up the background? It is probably supermassive black-hole binaries and/or early Universe physics. We don't know yet but it is likely a combination of both! 💥 It's paper release day tomorrow! Excited to share with you all!

Important advice: how to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

Showing the Universe to school students in Launceston ✨

It's #Pulsar confirmation day! Then PhD student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, actually detected the first signals from a pulsar on 6 Aug '67. From those results, Queen JBB connected the dots, this was astrophysical! But after this first detection in Aug, there was nothing. Until Nov 28. 📸 CSIROpedia 🔭📡

Jocelyn Bell Burnell transformed astronomy #OTD in 1967 when she made the first observation of a pulsar. She and advisor Antony Hewish initially dubbed the object LGM-1 (“Little Green Men”) for its regular signal, but soon identified it as a rotating, magnetized neutron star. (1/n) 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 ⚛️