Tips for writing recommendation letters, by someone reading them: 🧪🔭 1. If you're writing to give a very strong recommendation, say that in the first sentence. 2. If they did research for you, say that in the first few sentences. 3. "First, a little bit about me for context..." <- delete this.

Hmmm, interesting article. www.jconline.com/story/news/l...

December's episode of the #astrophysics #podcast is here! This month, I interview Dr. Kaitlin Kratter of the University of Arizona. We talk about how she figures out how the planets form by putting a solar system on the computer! 🔭🧪

Every now and then, you check into a hotel from a certain era and it's like you're spending the night inside a Denny's.

My daughter's current frustration: she wants to have her book and eat it too.

We just got our conference fliers printed out for Rise_Time 2026! Hope to hand out plenty of these at the HEAD meeting next week!

🔭🧪 Haven't posted here much lately, but I figured @sciencesocks.bsky.social would have words for me if I didn't promote Merel's episode of the #astrophysics #podcast! Dr. Merel van 't Hoff tells us all about the environments that new solar systems are born in! Check it out! rss.com/podcasts/ast...

Can't wait til half of these students stop coming to class so I can get a decent parking spot again.

The universe of Star Trek is set in an idyllic world where humans never invented social media.

My baby daughter gets pockets but my wife doesn't.

We're recording this episode soon, so in case you have any astronomy/astrophysics/science questions for us please post them here! The weirder the better. Also feel free to just ask about our lives. We're soliciting questions from a variety of sources! 🔭🧪

For the next episode of the #podcast, I hope to do an astrophysics Q&A. I invite you to reply with any questions about astrophysics, or questions about what it's like to be a scientist. To my scientist friends: feel free to reply if you like; just know I may quote your response in the podcast. 🧪🔭

Infant daughter: exhales air Me: I think she just said "dad"!

Good Morning! This month's episode of the #astrophysics #podcast is now available! I am interviewing Dr. Andrea Derdzinski and we talk all about black holes and how we search for them! Let's hope we can continue to do so in the future! 🔭🧪 rss.com/podcasts/ast...

The little one refuses to sleep unless Mama's in the room. So I've tried playing her episodes of the #podcast featuring the voice of Dr. Polin @therocketscientess.bsky.social . Not sure if it's working but maybe some of that astrophysics will absorb into her brain and she'll become a genius 🔭

I am now convinced that the words to "hush little baby" were completely improvised on the spot by two very tired parents. Because that's the only way I know how to do that song.

To anyone wondering why I haven't been answering my email, I just became a dad and suddenly I seem to only care about one thing. I'll try not to post too many photos but here's one:

Excited to announce the 'Rutgers Summer Transient Soiree' this July 16-18! To offset the uncertain funding landscape, we are offering a hybrid option + requiring NO registration fee. Non-faculty are especially encouraged to apply! Please apply by May 31! More in the replies! 🧪🔭☄️ #highenergyastro

Another episode of the #astrophysics #podcast is now available! I am interviewing Dr. Jared Goldberg from the Flatiron Institute, and we talk all about Betelgeuse. rss.com/podcasts/ast... 🧪🔭

I'm creating a pinned thread here, I'm hoping to get comments from scientists and non-scientists alike. I'm interested in your answer to the following question: In your opinion, why should we study astrophysics? 🧪🔭

Apparently I am not good at bluesky so I am posting this again, with the appropriate tags 🧪🔭. The latest episode of the #astrophysics #podcast is out! This month, I am interviewing Dr. Yvette Cendes of the University of Oregon @whereisyvette.bsky.social. Enjoy! rss.com/podcasts/ast...

The latest episode of the #astrophysics #podcast just aired today! I'm interviewing Dr. Yvette Cendes, @whereisyvette.bsky.social. We talk about her latest research on the crazy things that we see happen when a black hole eats a star! rss.com/podcasts/ast...

Google AI with some slick mathemagic:

Happy Weekend! The latest episode of the #astrophysics #podcast has been released! 🧪🔭 This month I am interviewing Dr. Maxim Lyutikov, who studies fast radio bursts and astrophysical plasmas. We also discuss connections to our own sun and the aurora borealis. rss.com/podcasts/ast...

Very impressive astro seminar yesterday by @whereisyvette.bsky.social -- Incredible new data on tidal disruption events (TDEs), it pays to keep looking in the radio! 🧪🔭 (This plot is old data from 3 years ago -- you'll have to ask Yvette if you want the latest, but the light curve is still rising!)

My graduate student Dillon Hasenour just got this paper accepted to ApJ! 🧪🔭 He developed methods for incorporating a nuclear network onto a moving mesh and developed benchmark tests to demonstrate the advantages, including a semi-analytic solution for a detonation wave! arxiv.org/abs/2502.02693

Poor Google AI.

🧪🔭 Good Morning! The latest episode of the Astrophysics Podcast is out today! I'm interviewing Dr. Lindsey Kwok, a research fellow at Northwestern University. She uses JWST to learn how supernovae exploded! rss.com/podcasts/ast... #astrophysics #podcast

After reading through enough personal statements in grad school applications, the phrase "my academic journey" almost starts to sound like something a normal human would say.

So glad I burned through my NSF grant right away. Always eat the first marshmallow!

I've always said I hate applying for research grants. So in that sense, good news everyone! Be careful what you wish for!

At no point in our curriculum do we teach our students how to make a decent plot, and then on the off-chance we ask for a plot on the homework, we're always surprised when all their plots look hideous. 🎢

Hope all my astronomer friends are having fun at #AAS245. Some of us have to teach our first day of Stat Mech to a room full of graduate students. By the way, unrelated -- does anyone here know what a partition function is?

As we all know, "syllabus" is the latin word for "list of university-wide policies and legal disclaimers".

Happy Hanukkah! Please ignore the reflection of our Christmas tree in the window.

Happy new year! The latest episode of the astrophysics podcast is now available! Dr. Abigail Polin is hosting this episode. And she's interviewing a MYSTERY GUEST. (ok fine, she's interviewing me, big deal) 🧪🔭 rss.com/podcasts/ast...

Just finished editing episode 13 of the astrophysics podcast. Eight hours to spare -- this is about as close as I've ever cut it! But rest assured, season 2 will begin at 12am (I'm sure you'll have nothing better to do than listen to my podcast at midnight tonight). 🧪🔭

Grades are submitted, and the complaints have been minimal!

@sciencesocks.bsky.social Unbeknownst to me, my brother & sister-in-law went to your website and got us this JWST ornament for our tree! We put it in a place of honor, right below the goat. Very nice work, it's shiny!

Apparently the standard now is everybody just teaches from slides. I thought that was just for 300-student torture classes. Don't we remember how awful it was when a teacher did that to us? 🎢

Did "Little India" ever mean anything other than these three obnoxious store fronts with a trillion seizure-inducing christmas lights? Be honest. (of course, as ridiculous as they were I will still miss them) www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/n...

Osborne et al challenge the interpretations of the distribution of GRB durations. The original claim was that the burst duration is the engine duration minus the breakout time and this is seen in the data. I agree with Osborne here. Also, GRB data are massively biased.🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2310.19941

A lot of my fellow professors are satisfied if the distribution of their final exam scores follow a normal gaussian distribution (bell curve). I don't know why that makes them happy, since you also get that distribution if your students just guess all the answers randomly. #iTeachPhysics

Cool result from @starlights.bsky.social (Sears et al). Late-time observations of the BOAT (GRB 221009A). Definitely a supernova associated, and they see a break in the afterglow around 50 days, maybe when the collimation angle of the jet became causally connected.🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2412.02663

"Imagine I have a gun that shoots photons" ... "Imagine I have a flashlight..." #iTeachPhysics

Episode 12 of The Astrophysics Podcast just dropped! I interviewed Dr. Brenna Mockler from Carnegie Observatories. She is a theorist who works on what we call "Tidal Disruption Events" -- essentially, what happens when a black hole eats up a star! Check it out! 🧪🔭 rss.com/podcasts/ast...

If you're traveling over the break and looking for a podcast to listen to, here's one about astrophysics: 🧪🔭 rss.com/podcasts/ast...

My student Allen Murray just submitted his first paper! Binary stars gain eccentricity when accreting gas from a disk. Allen showed that this is true for a set of observed accreting binary systems, and the eccentricity of their orbits agree with theoretical predictions.🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2411.13489

DESI weighs in on the Hubble tension. They measure the clustering of matter on large scales, which depends on dark matter/dark energy. The data suggest that dark energy was not a constant, but emerged in the recent past. Still relies on Type Ia supernova calibration.🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2411.12022

arXiv posting by Shah et al. They argue to keep LIGO on instead of shutting down for 2 years to up sensitivity (which is the current plan). They estimate we'd see another neutron star merger like the one in 2017. I don't know the best strategy but they did the math.🧪🔭 arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09002