National Science Foundation significantly downgrades the review process of its proposals... 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

I disagree with a significant fraction of this article, but still it's an interesting and thought-stimulating read on an issue I've been grappling with... www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d... 🧪

ESA/Webb picture of the month - image of interacting dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485. Interaction between these galaxies led to a recent starburst and formation of star clusters. 🔭 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

Schrödinger's plates: the plates are simultaneously whole and broken and we won't know their true state until we open the cabinet... ) p.s. This month marks the 90th anniversary of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving cat in a chamber.

A fantastic image by @ajamesmccarthy.bsky.social cosmicbackground.io/pages/ea_int... 🧪🔭

Food for thought/discussion. 🧪

Aurora over lake Michigan tonight. In the background are Castor, Pollux, Jupiter, and Procyon. 🔭

Metric Tip xkcd.com/3164/

Euclid’s “Tuning Fork” By way of a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, here's another Euclid Q1 product. This one is an updated version of the famous "Tuning Fork" representation of galaxy morphology: Credits: Diagram: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, Diagram by J.-C. Cuillandre, L. Quilley, F.…

(Adler) Planetarium eclipse... 🔭

"Beyond Hubble": a workshop aimed to trigger cross discussions between observers and theorists on our current understanding on galaxy morphology and kinematics, with an emphasis on revisiting the Hubble Sequence in the modern-day galaxy formation framework. sites.google.com/cam.ac.uk/be... 🔭

So how much of the £2356 you charge per paper goes to these "essential" peer reviewers?

🔭 Galaxies, Stars, and Dust Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Eder apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

a BEAUTIFUL image of spiral galaxy ngc 1068 that uses combined data from hubble, jwst, AND chandra telescopes!!!! 🌌

I used this from the Opticks in my PhD thesis: it seems probable to me that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles of such Sizes and Figures and with such other Properties and in such Proportion to Space as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them

Reading a section of Newton's "Opticks", I think he should have enlisted ChatGPT to help him with his spelling.

A new fantastic image of M82 by JWST NIRCam, showing a biconical outflow of gas and dust from this starbursting galaxy. 🔭🧪 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

I have completed my contributions to this field thank you

And here a lovely overview of #arxiv statistics from Ralph Wijers. #Astrodon #openscience #eas2025

Want to instead explore the Virgo Cluster as captured by Rubin at full resolution? Head to our Skyviewer and enjoy some cosmic joyscrolling! There's so much to explore and discover ✨ #RubinFirstLook #CaptureTheCosmos 🔭🧪 ➡️ skyviewer.app

In case you've been contemplating moving elsewhere in our Galaxy... bsky.app/profile/phdc...

NEW: Astronomers used Hubble to re-examined the prediction that the Milky Way galaxy will eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy. They find there is only a fifty-fifty chance the two galaxies will smash together within the next 10 billion years: bit.ly/3YzymOx 🔭 🧪

Courtesy of @karpathy.bsky.social

The science paper publication industry gives millions in revenues to the publishers, but is created for free by the experts. The value-add of publication (what people pay for) is much less than that of peer-review and editorial (which they don't). It is ripe for disruption. Hopefully like this.

This may not be obvious, but a paper like the Naidu et al on the new distance record holder galaxy arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263 would normally be submitted to Nature. The fact that it was submitted to the @ojastro.bsky.social signals a major shift in the field. 🔭🧪

A galaxy at redshift z=14.44? This morning's arXiv mailing presented me with a distraction from examination marking in the form of a paper by Naidu et al. with this abstract: This paper has been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I usually feel a bit conflicted in situations when a…

not yet sure whether this is useful at all, but an interesting concept: each arXiv paper is a star and the nearest stars are papers on related topics: soarxiv.org It only has papers up to April 2025 rn (if you lose your cursor, hit Esc to recover it). 🔭

If your next European adventure does not pan out, Illinois has alternatives to offer...

Andrej Karpathy: Deep Dive into LLMs Like ChatGPT [video] Discussion

Happy Sunday blue sky! 3 GitHub Repos to learn more about #AI and #ML 1. Neural Networks: Zero to Hero from Andrej Karpathy. lnkd.in/erA-Gerp 2. Machine Learning Andrew Ng’s lectures lnkd.in/ebtWemWD 3. Deep Learning Specialization - Andrew Ng’s lectures & practice problems lnkd.in/e2RECCSQ

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

A reminder from @astrokatie.com at the end of her "Picture an Astronomer" talk at UChicago tonight that no matter what you see in the news, things can get MUCH worse if the Higgs field tunnels to its true vacuum state... 🧪🔭

If our kick-off celebration (incl. a talk from @highzclouds.bsky.social) on Jan. 30 isn't sufficient diversion, come hear Dara Norman talk about global scale astronomy from the Windy City on Feb. 3! Free for the public in person and also streamed online! More at pictureanastronomer.github.io 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "On the universality of star formation efficiency in galaxies" by Ava Polzin & Andrey V. Kravtsov (U. Chicago) and Vadim A. Semenov & Nickolay Y. Gnedin (CfA Harvard), all based in the USA astro.theoj.org/article/1270...

Visualization of the Milky Way based on the current data from the Gaia space mission that took its last data today. 🧪

Best wishes for 2025 everyone! 🧪

From Yuan-Sen Ting on X. Evolution of the programming languages use in astronomy research. 🔭

I've contributed... astro.theoj.org/article/1274...

I'm generally apathetic towards AI. When I participated in user studies of this tool, I could maybe finally see a way that it could help astronomers do research. Awesome work by Iyer et al, including @jwuphysics.bsky.social, @jegpeek.bsky.social. 🔭🧪 ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJS...

Extrapolation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics This morning I published another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, taking the total number of publications for this year to 115 and the total altogether to 230. This means that we have now published as many papers this year as we have in…

Intergalactic salsa dance anyone? This is an infrared image of merging galaxies IC 2163 and NGC 2207 by the MIRI instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. If you wonder why it looks different than typical images of galaxies, this is because this image shows dust particles and dense gas.

Not a particularly impressive image taken with my phone (but what do you expect from a theorist?..) on a flight last week. This view of the Moon and Venus over Mississippi at sunset was pretty mesmerizing though. 🧪

🔭 Rocket Engine Fireplace Image and Video Credit: NASA apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap24120...

Firefly Sparkle is a galaxy with mass was discovered in JWST observations of a galaxy cluster as a highly lensed and magnified source. Remarkably, about half of stars in this galaxy are in 10 massive star clusters. This galaxy provides a unique view into the youth of our own Milky Way galaxy. 🔭

@jwstfeed.bsky.social Amazing new field imaged by JWST with a nascent cluster of galaxies. esawebb.org/news/weic2428/ 🔭

The Journal of Universal Rejection As (both) my regular readers know I have a strong interest in innovative publication methods. I am therefore grateful to have found out about a very intriguing one. I think this approach might help us at the Open Journal of Astrophysics cut our running costs…

Voyage of the Moons This is a video I made in 2018 showing moons Europa and Io out in front of Jupiter then Titan with Saturn. Made with still imagery taken by NASA’s Cassini mission. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill