Merry Christmas from this galaxy specifically 🎄🌀🌌🔭

It is time for universities — not just staff and student unions, but the senior management too — to admit out loud that this government is actively trying to make universities fail. We *all* need to come together and collectively try to fight their attempts to loot and pillage.

We are live for a crisis mapping project post-Melissa! Excellent thread by Izzy below on the details and how to join ( planetaryresponsenetwork.org ) A lot of the methods we use to accurately crowdsource this mapping are derived from astrophysics citizen science work like @galaxyzoo.org 🔭🌎

This is on the rise as large projects with large teams become more common. When I was a postdoc I separated my CV publist into “led and supervised”, “major contributor”, and “team contributor” sub-lists. When I’m reading CVs for a job panel, I appreciate similar sub-structures.

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815. 🧪 🎃 The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but he showed them all in 1872 when he announced that he had created a MONSTER. Let's learn about the terrible thing he did. Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

When I was leading an interdisciplinary collaboration and my name would have been last for “funded this” reasons, I happily ceded that position to a valued colleague whose field elevates last authorship (mine doesn’t). It was a win-win at the time, which Google will now punish me for? Coolcoolcool

Forgot to add the 🔭 🧪 for the feeds, and ran out of characters to note in this reply that this would all be happening as we get cooked by the photosphere of the Sun as it expands into its Red Giant phase

Me: this is great, glad to see authors ripped off by AI getting their due. Me after using the search tool: I am one of these ripped off authors. Academics, it only takes a minute. Seven of my papers are in this and I had no idea.

This image of a young planet clearing its orbit in the protoplanetary disk around a distant star (the star itself is obscured) is stunning. Of course it’s beautiful, but it’s also a remarkable technical achievement for the study authors, the observatory, and the instrument scientists. Well done!

It's paper day! We use our Ōtautahi-Oxford model of the Galaxy's interstellar object population to understand the origins of 3I/ATLAS, from only its velocity @astrohopkins.bsky.social, Dorsey, @redshiftless.bsky.social, @astrokiwi.bsky.social, @chrislintott.bsky.social & Leicester, submitted A 🧵🔭

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

Reason #1 why I am 'violently angry' about AI: A huge amount of the work to train these models has been outsourced to a hidden, low-paid African workforce. It's modern-day economic colonialism another way. E.g.: 1. restofworld.org/2025/big-tec... 2. www.wired.com/story/low-pa...

A new, thorough reanalysis of the data that led to claims of biosignatures on K2-18b from @luiswel.bsky.social & friends - a nicely written lesson on why this stuff is hard. They find no significant evidence for DMS, the gas the Cambridge team claimed to have found. arxiv.org/abs/2504.21788

A barred spiral galaxy, observed with the Apache Point 2.5m Telescope in the SDSS survey. It is at redshift 0.018 (lookback time 257.3 million years) with coordinates (141.53929, 49.31021). 33 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo 2.

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

RAS members: *please* vote in the elections (check your inbox), and please read the **CVs** of the council nominees. One has a vaguely plausible statement and a CV screed that makes clear they will be actively hostile to certain vulnerable community members. Please vote to show that isn’t us! ☄️🔭🚩🚩🚩

RAS members: *please* vote in the elections (check your inbox), and please read the **CVs** of the council nominees. One has a vaguely plausible statement and a CV screed that makes clear they will be actively hostile to certain vulnerable community members. Please vote to show that isn’t us! ☄️🔭🚩🚩🚩

Matt and Izzy both did excellent work in this paper!

Saving this one for Valentine’s Day ❤️🧪🔭

What a beauty! So many cool features, and a background galaxy peeking through the edge of the disk. This is pretty much a textbook spiral. 🧪🔭

Lovely example of a nearly-edge-on disk galaxy, whose features would be clearer if we viewed it from a different angle. I’m so glad we put lookback time into these posts; I love being reminded that even at z=0.34 the lookback time is almost the full age of the Sun. 🧪🔭

What a beauty. Do we think the little blue smudge is an overlapping dwarf galaxy, or a wee star-forming part of the main galaxy? Something else? 🔭🧪

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate, and especially to this tree-topper centrepiece beauty 🔭😍

As I gear up to do some astrophysics literature review report marking today, I’m reminded of the 4th year report I read years ago that started with the line, “Since the start of the Universe, a lot has changed.” I hope that former student is currently living their best life. 🔭

I recognise this clumpy W galaxy from the GOODS field! I don’t know how it came to look like this, but I love it anyway. Plus, stars in CANDELS look like spiky psychedelic jewels. 😍🔭 I don’t typically know specific galaxies by heart, but sometimes they’re just so distinctive that you remember them.

There's so much stuff on our social media timelines that we scroll past quickly, maybe with a "oh cool" and then moving on, but if you stop and think about what you are seeing here, it's really amazing. You're watching a high-resolution panorama view from *another* *world*. Wow. Just wow. 🔭

I’m so proud of my PhD students who graduated today. It’s corny, but, @izgarland.bsky.social and @davidoryan.bsky.social worked so hard through such a difficult and scary time in the world to do fantastic science, and they deserve every success. 🔭❤️ Also, graduation means they came back to visit! 🎉

🚨🚨New paper alert!! 🚨🚨🧪🔭 Today we published exciting new results from the Rosetta mission! These results have big implications for where the comet formed and for whether comets could have supplied water to Earth. #PlanetaryScience #Rosetta 🧵1/n www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’ve had A Week such that the most science I can muster for this right now is “galaxies pretty”, but I will say that redshift 0.23 is pretty nearby as far as Hubble is concerned, which is why we get such a lovely view of what would be a tiny, fuzzy blob from most ground-based telescopes 😍🧪🔭

I’ve seen some posts recently, about the value of basic research, in light of funding cuts and demands that research have immediate economic justification. Let me collect some info here, in a thread, about why it’s a bad idea to attach those sorts of demands to funding. 🧵 🧪 ⚛️

I love that this system of merging galaxies, whose light travelled nearly 8 billion years to get to us, looks like a space butterfly in Bluesky blue 🦋 The specific blue is from the filters @galaxyzoo.org chose for visualisation, but to human eyes it would likely also be blue! 🔭🧪

No matter where we go, humans will be flawed in the same human way.

We sometimes get comments asking “why is it so fuzzy?” or “can you zoom in?” If you took a thin human hair and held it at arm’s length up to the sky, its width is much wider than the size of this image on the sky. And this is looking 7.5 billion years into the past. It’s already very zoomed in! 🧪🔭

Just hanging out in the void, maybe gonna make a new friend later.

In honor of all the new arrivals, I'm sharing one of my favorite videos. It shows 24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock. Brilliant work by Bartosz Wojczyński. 🧪 artuniverse.eu/gallery/1907...

I'm almost scared to re-up this, given the recent influx (now there are more of you than there are planets!), but... who wants a planet?

I rarely repost these because I’m partial to disk galaxies, but I also like to contemplate how these spheroidal galaxies with few distinctive “features” likely got that way by trainwrecking with other galaxies in the distant past. They can easily have >100 Billion stars, more than the Milky Way. 🧪🔭

This is fun. Looking back 7.7 billion years to see what looks like a *very* prominent and asymmetric dust lane. Hope this is in the COSMOS-Web footprint so we can get the JWST view of it! 🔭🧪

Having just complained about the headline I feel like maybe I should say something about the science, so: As much as people like to imagine black holes as insatiable cosmic garbage disposals, it is actually not at all clear to astronomers how they manage to eat as much as they do! 🧵

(Just realized that I haven't advertized the Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist on this platform.) If you are an LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈 astronomers/astrophysicists (or an ally) and are comfortable of being out, you can join the Astro Outlist to help increase LGBTQ+ visibility and connect with local community!

It's finally here! Happy Women in Physics Day! Throughout the day I'll be adding to this thread, sharing info about amazing women in physics, why we're still under-represented in the field and what can be done to change that. 🎢 👩🏻‍🔬🧪⚛️

For new followers, we have put together a Starter Pack of LGBTQIA+ people in STEM. If you like to join it, please let us know - we still have room on this one or we can start a second one. And if you are on it and at any point it is unsafe to be do get in touch! go.bsky.app/BFc4wgf

okay, so. i have bipolar disorder. we have a suicide rate of about 1/5. i've basically spent my entire teenage and adult life trying not to kill myself. so with that in mind, here are my tips on how to hang in there: 1) don't isolate. i know all the excuses. but don't do it

It is past my expat bedtime, but I don’t actually expect to sleep. Instead I’m going to avoid the news and stare at galaxies until my eyes droop and my phone crashes on my face and wakes me up and we start all over again. This one’s got light that’s been travelling to us for over 2 billion years.

Calling all UK researchers and carers (including parents!) 🚨 The deadline for the #CarersInSTEMM Survey has been EXTENDED to 08/11/24 - and we want to hear from you! Tell us about your experiences and help us make a difference! Spread the word! 📣 Why wait? ⏰ Take the survey here: t.co/fpCZgDVrrG

Reminder! We are hiring a Postdoc Researcher in High-z Galaxy Evolution with JWST at @spacetelescope.bsky.social in Baltimore, MD - working with me. STScI has a vibrant community of extragalactic researchers, and you will also be part of a larger European-led collaboration. aas.org/jobregister/...

The small Alaska community of 'Talkeetna' is unincorporated, with a population a little over 1000 people. They have a Community Council and an honorary Mayor. From 1997-2017, that Mayor was Stubbs, a tailless orange cat. Stubbs' duties: overseeing operations at a general store, greeting tourists.

perhaps my proudest academic accomplishment is that I published an article that cites itself

Let me tell you about something I care deeply about: measuring the number of red giant stars in the outskirts ("stellar halos") of galaxies. This is also a thread about polling. 🔭 🧵

Like the game The Oregon Trail, this beloved orange tablet feels like a very specific generational marker. I can still hear the beeps and “voice.”