Before being locked in a basement at the TNG offices for two days of WEAVE Science Processing & Analysis meeting (my first as part of the CASU team!), I managed to check out the southernmost tip of La Palma 🌋

Big news! @astroeth.bsky.social has his Nature paper on the Emergence of Globular Clusters out today! His simulations have globulars forming naturally, as well as some cool globular cluster like dwarfs! Check it out! 🔭🧪☄️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔭 Blue Arcs Toward Andromeda Image Credit & Copyright: Ogle et al. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25080...

Big day for the matriarchy! 🥳 Huge congrats to the awesome Prof. Doughtery, lead on the Jupiter-bound ESA JUICE mission & STFC Exec Chair. If anyone's confused on the astro royal hierarchy: Michele and I are the astro equivalents of 🇬🇧Westminster and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Holyrood 🤗 ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 👩‍🔬🔭🧪

Our sister institute at Durham, the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, are advertising for a five year lectureship position 🔭☄️ Advertisement is here, have a look and come join us in pretty Durham: durham.taleo.net/careersectio... #astrosci

Hanyuan Zhang won for the paper: "Kinematics and dynamics of the Galactic bar revealed by Gaia long-period variables" by Hanyuan Zhang, Vasily Belokurov, N Wyn Evans, Sarah G Kane, and Jason L Sanders. academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

At NAM 2025 in Durham @nam25-durham.bsky.social Anke Ardern-Arentsen is speaking on Carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars as probes for early chemical enrichment. Anke has published in #MNRAS: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

"Ending bullying and precarity should be Cambridge chancellor’s focus" says Prof Wyn Evans "There is a need for University ombudsman to investigate cases of mismanagement or misconduct I urge my fellow candidates for chancellor to back this call" www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/endi...

A story about Annie Walker, a 19th cent. astronomer who worked at the Cambridge Observatory, a forerunner to the IoA ... www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Happy to announce that the line-detector.oca.eu website is now online! It allows the user to select the stellar type, [M/H], λ- range, and resolving power and the page returns: -purity of the line and minimum S/N required to detect it. -interactive plot to identify the lines in the spectra

Nice view of the Sun 🌞 today from @cambridgeastro.bsky.social - thanks to Robin Catchpole 🔭

Wyn Evans of 21 Group is standing If we can put together an alliance of everyone who is left out of decision-making in our universities, we can bring about real change In universities, power is controlled by a tiny elite Let's make this election about the principle of academic self-governance

The 2025 Gruber Cosmology Prize has been awarded to Professor Max Pettini (IoA) and Professor Ryan Cooke (who is currently faculty at Durham, and was an IoA PhD student 2008-2011). www.ast.cam.ac.uk/news/2025-gr...

Such a good view for a meeting room, and the view at the dinner was amazing too 😍 @ Pristine collaboration meeting, Nice Observatory @obscoteazur.bsky.social

In person voting for Chancellorship of Cambridge will break for University's candidate If you did degree at Cambridge, you can vote online but must register beforehand Deadline to register for online voting is 2 May Act now Please repost to ensure wide electorate www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-un...

Recommend going through your spam folder after an academic rejection: "The paper with the title (...) has left a deep impression on us", "We believe your insights would be highly valuable to our readership", "I understand that you are an outstanding researcher" ✨

Deadline is tomorrow!

This seems like a valuable use of the position of Chancellor of Cambridge University. I have nominated Wyn Evans and encourage anyone else eligible (anyone with a Masters or PhD from Cambridge) to do the same.

For a recent outreach talk I created this visualisation of real stellar spectra (from the LAMOST survey) - showing a metal-rich, a very metal-poor, and a carbon-enhanced very metal-poor star with similar temperatures (~5000K). Look at those massive molecular carbon bands for the CEMP star! ✨🔭

I love all the fake astro papers on arXiv 🔭🧪 today! (thread of links) 1/ Feng Shui in the Universe: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22800 One for the Swifties: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22795 Kepler’s Platonic model after all: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22793 Let’s just throw deep learning at it: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22786

NAM abstract submission closes *today* don't forget to submit yours and join us in beautiful Durham in July! 🔭 #astrosci

Spring is springing at the Institute of Astronomy!

Astronomy Plot of the Week is back! Submit a great plot/graph/diagram by tagging @plotastro.bsky.social It does not have to be yours, but it has to include a publicly accessible link (i.e. arXiv, ADS, etc.) 🔭

I love singing with the #Cambridge University Gospel #Choir 😍 so enjoyed our concert at Great St Mary’s tonight! 🎶

🔭 The Protostars within Lynds 483 Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25031...

To live in Cambridge is to be surrounded by amazing built history. One favourite of mine is the Round Church, where I've had the privilege of speaking a couple of times. It was built approx. ~1130AD, likely before the first human settlement in my homeland of NZ 🤯 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_...

We're delighted to announce that applications are now being welcomed for the 2025 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship. 🔭🎓 The Lectureship was established to celebrate Caroline’s memory by supporting promising women astronomers early in their careers. 👩‍🔬 Find out more at: buff.ly/Njo7oIH

Having fun with a CD spectroscope and my old office desk lamp! Getting ready for the school kids visiting later this week for International Women’s Day ✨ 🔭

Re-upping this: @astropy.org is running our first user survey! If you use Astropy, please help us by filling this out and sharing it with your students / colleagues / collaborations / departments: forms.gle/dE3F6Rd8yTes... 🧪🔭

Bad news for team asteroid, good news for squishy humans. Yay!

Paper now published! 🎉 There are two fun new figures, showing how carbon-enhanced stars are offset from normal stars in the CMD (not a new result, but neat to see with this data) ✨ academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... (incl. mention to colour in figure descriptions...)

Great thread! There’s a small (but not zero) chance that 2024 YR4 becomes a menace. The bad news is that we might not know for sure until 2028. The good news is that we should be able to do something about it 😀🔭

MNRAS now suggests to remove all mention of colour from figure captions. I understand not everyone sees every colour the same (and I try to make my figures colour-blind friendly), but isn't it still helpful to point out the different colours in the caption? What do people think? #astronomy

Astronomy & Astrophysics have almost halved their page cap from 20 pages to 12 pages - you have to pay 150€ per extra page. The reasoning is that they're getting too many submissions. But surely this just encourages authors to submit *more* short papers? 🔭 www.aanda.org/2025-press-r...

The end of Gaia observations will be a sad day, but I think it's also something worth celebrating, as Gaia has been an incredibly successful mission. And best of all, the data is completely open and free for anyone to access - it's a monumental triumph of open science. 🔭

This thread is for authors of scientific papers, and particularly astronomers. I struggled a bit with how explicit I had to be, but I think including a name is important. We (meaning all the major journals) have rules against submitting a manuscript to more than one journal at a time. 1/6

Incredible news! Hannah Fry is joining us in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge as the first-ever Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics. www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

Having a wonderful time at #IAUS395, the “Stellar Populations in the Milky Way and Beyond” symposium in Paraty, Brazil 🤩 Both scientifically and otherwise a great meeting, celebrating the career of Beatrice Barbuy 🔭✨

🔭🌟 Paper day! We're using the low-res Gaia XP spectra to derive metallicities and carbon abundances, focusing on metal-poor, *very* carbon-rich stars! These probe binary interactions & the very First Stars. Here are a few of the highlight figures (see alt text for details) arxiv.org/abs/2410.11077

I had to look twice when I spotted this drycleaners shop in Tauranga, NZ! I wonder who designed their Pristine logo first 🤔✨🧺

Never thought the first time I’d see the aurora would be from my bedroom window in Cambridge!! 🤩🤩

Accepted version now on arXiv 🎉🤩 With a few new figures, supporting our previous findings: evidence for two distinct halo components in the inner few kpc of the Galaxy - one faster rotating & lower dispersion, and a more diffuse, almost stationary component arxiv.org/abs/2312.03847

Advantages of working from home: being able to do a little (big?) happy dance after paper acceptance! 🎉

Hello there! Are you on the job market? Do you love astrophysics? Then how about applying for one of our 3 open Research Fellow positions at the University of Surrey? One of them is with me! Find and study dwarf galaxies with Michelle! 🔭🧪 jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

🔭 Paper day! "🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷: Characterising the orbital properties of the ancient, very metal-poor inner Milky Way" - arxiv.org/abs/2312.03847 - it's been years in the making, & I'm so relieved to have submitted it! A short paper thread: [1/5]

Finally submitted a paper that's been in the making for many years!! Keep an eye on the arXiv tomorrow for some 🐷 🐷

Paper update! 🌟 Last week, Hanyuan Zhang (previously master/now PhD student at the IoA) submitted his paper on the main components of the Milky Way as function of metallicity, with a focus on the very metal-poor (VMP) disc - does it exist? 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2311.09294

Eclipse Rings - © Jerry Zhang (left), Baolong Chen (photographer) & Amber Zhang (right) Official: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231016.html HD: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2310/AnnularProposal_Zhang_3500.jpg Please enjoy following threads too! 🔭

For the new Data Intensive Science MPhil in Cambridge, students have to do a "reproducibility" project - reproduce the results of a published paper. Anyone have any ideas/suggestions for good Galactic Archaeology projects? The students have coding skills but not necessarily astro background. 🔭

Thanks to my amazing co-authors @tada-matsuno.bsky.social @nfmartin1980.bsky.social @ankeaa.bsky.social and non-bluesky people - Else, Kim, Nicolas L., Raymond, Sebastien, Georges, Zhen, Martin, Federico. Let me also take this chance to say that I'm on the postdoc market this fall. :)