The moment we've all been waiting for is finally here… On June 29, 2026, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)! 🔭🧪☄️🌌 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/action-...

“We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.” Worth taking a few minutes to read. From @sciam.bsky.social and including @axisprobe.bsky.social PI Chris Reynolds. www.scientificamerican.com/article/amer...

The Roman Research Nexus is live—a cloud-based environment to explore simulated Roman datasets, run notebooks, and prepare for Roman’s petabyte-scale data. 🔗 Get started today: bit.ly/4aHn4P4 #RomanResearchNexus #AAS248

When Taylor drops new vinyl but a student walks into your office & you have <1 s to decide if your should secure record or be professional & you choose chaos and say “Hold on I am doing something related to Taylor Swift” & the student just looks confused & you panic-buy two vinyl you did not need.

Folks, we survived another semester 😮‍💨 I’m heading off to my Modern Physics final in a v appropriate shirt, and then it’s officially summer ☀️ I hope everyone gets a chance to touch some grass and some data this summer. 💪

This report came out today by minority staff of the House science committee on how three NASA missions were aborted due to NASA illegally following the FY26 president's budget request instead of congressionally approved budget. Very important reading. 🔭🧪 democrats-science.house.gov/staff-report...

Ngl, getting in some back stretches before my lecture on solving the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom bc every inch of the chalkboard is about to get used. #GettingOld 😭

It always feels like there are multiple proposals demanding my attention and never enough time left for actual science 😭 Proposal writing can be fun ... but I’m really missing analyzing my data 💔

I pulled the trig and bought my doctoral regalia this week!! I'm tired of showing up to my students’ graduations in a rental cap and gown that makes me look like I’m graduating with them. Not waiting for tenure (when regalia is discounted) to fix a 3-hour-per-year identity crisis. #treatyoself 🎓

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

There are 1 million light settings in my classroom. Tried turning off just the front lights. ~5 attempts. Once the room went completely dark. “Haha, won’t happen again.” It happened 4 more times. The loudest silence I’ve ever heard. “Don’t make a statistics joke. Don’t make a statistics joke.”

It’s been a heartbreaking few weeks 💔, but I’m glad the broader community can now understand what happened with AXIS. I learned so much being part of the team, and I truly hope the X-ray community gets a new high-resolution imager one day. #XraysAreTheBestRays

If you are not a (professional or amateur) astronomer and you ask me what some bright point in the sky is, I’ll probably answer “Jupiter”. Neither of us will know if I’m right, but we’ll both be satisfied

Day started in a magical way lecturing on Bohr’s model and how it leads to the empirical relations measured by Rydberg. Then I found out my first-ever JWST proposal as a Co-I was accepted... written with one of my favorite people, Keren Sharon ❤️ Riding this momentum… back to the Chandra proposal 😵‍💫

The students don’t own staplers, I’ve come to understand. They bring me loose stacks Of paper in their hands. Perhaps the stapler’s obsolete, A relic, long since gone. Except the one upon my desk, That everyone relies on.

Once again I find myself living in a new neighborhood in March, and the late-night search for calzones begins…. #XraysAreTheBestRays 🔭 🔥 🕳️ 🔥

Sometimes it feels like my baby is in a quantum superposition of awake and asleep … & the wavefunction collapses when I open the Nanit app.

Pure joy: a brand new piece of chalk for my morning lecture #ItsTheLittleThings

“ciao” is challenging to spell when you’ve slept in 2 hour chunks the night before 😵‍💫 #iykyk #xraysarethebestrays #somanyvowelssomanycombos

I’m hiring a postdoc to work with me at UMBC on AGN and galaxy mergers 💫 Details: apply.interfolio.com/180085 Please share & feel free to message me with any questions!

I spent so many hours in this library when I was a student, wandering through its cool collection, reading and learning. “…the federal government will store some of the collection in warehouses and trash the rest.” Absolutely heartbreaking 💔

Writing an NSF AAG with my 4 m/o permanently attached to me and averaging <2 hours of consecutive sleep… my dear collaborators, please triple-check all my text. (I’m so grateful for this little human, and for the ability to keep doing what I love, even if a bit more slowly these days.)

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

Find yourself a friend like @astronomay.bsky.social who drops off Taylor Swift–themed desserts while you’re on maternity leave 😍🔥 (I’ve only managed to snap a photo ... demanding, but cute, baby won’t let me actually eat them yet)

When Adi Foord's work on supermassive black holes received NSF funding, it created prime opportunities for UMBC students to contribute, like Ph.D. student Zack Reeves and his research on pairs of black holes in the early stages of a potential merger. umbc.edu/stories/blac...

Thanks to the @umbc.edu for highlighting my recent NSF AAG grant and the student research it supports! And yes - I’m 38 weeks pregnant in these photos. I’m proud to show that it’s possible to lead a thriving science program while also prioritizing life outside of work 💫 umbc.edu/stories/blac...

A very curious 12-year old Kieran asked @theconversation.com, "How does the camera on the James Webb Space Telescope work and see so far out?" UMBC's @adifoord.bsky.social, assistant professor of physics, to the rescue! umbc.edu/stories/how-...

American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history The largest brain drain in history was when thousands of scientists left Nazi Germany; it became known as "Hitler's gift." America's current assault on science is set to surpass that. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #science

💥💥 Double detonation!  For the first time, astronomers have obtained visual evidence that a star met its end by detonating twice. The fingerprint that points to this mechanism is represented by two separate shells of calcium.   Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2511/ 🔭 🧪 ☄️ 1/

The James Webb #Space Telescope doesn't take regular photos - its detectors convert infrared light to digital data, which scientists on Earth process into the stunning full-color space images we see. buff.ly/zKxkEBk #JWST By @adifoord.bsky.social, University of Maryland, Baltimore County 🔭

Check out my latest "Curious Kids" article with the @us.theconversation.com about how the James Webb Space Telescope can see so far back in time 💫🛰️🤩 theconversation.com/how-can-the-...

lol so many memories of stressful afternoons trying to perfectly time my submissions

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is releasing its first images on 23 June, showing us galaxies as we’ve never seen them before. Here’s how you can join a watch party to see those shots in full definition.

Don’t miss our interactive AGN SIG session TODAY at 10am AK! Come to Egan Rm 11/12 to learn about the progress we’ve made since the last Astro2020, the upcoming NASA mission capabilities, and where we go from here. #AAS246 🔭 cor.gsfc.nasa.gov/copag/meetin...

A wild @norashipp.bsky.social appears!

Don't miss our new NASA Science spending and economic impact resource at dashboards.planetary.org/nasa-science.html — see space science spending in every state and congressional district and custom reports for each region. A unique resource.

There's a lot to unpack in the president's FY26 requested #NASA budget, but the near zeroing of the physics of the cosmos program (from $196M to $1.5M) is especially bleak. If passed, the future of high-energy astrophysics is not in the US. 🔭

The White House Vision for Dismantling Science in One Simple Plot (Proposed NIH, NSF, and NASA budgets would be catastrophic for innovation and discovery. But they aren’t reality yet. The time to speak up is now.) joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/the-white-...

Got my PhD in Spring 2020 (peak lockdown, no hooding ceremony). Now I’m an Assistant Professor heading to undergrad commencement… and I have no clue how to wear this hood 😅🎓 Currently studying Google Images like it’s a final exam. Wish me luck! 👍

Grading is finished.

The homework has been graded... and a few students sent back secret codes with unique seeds for me to decipher on my end 🥹 "Your class was amazing to take" "You were an amazing professor to have" "I immensely enjoyed this class" "... this was a great class and I truly enjoyed it"

Wrapped up the last lecture of the semester and still standing! Today’s last student project presentation was an awesome one on Hawking Radiation — such a great way to end the semester 🎉 👏🏼 (I do have >30 hours of grading left, but we won’t think about that right now)

📞 Your voice matters! Today, call your senators and representatives to tell them why funding science and space is critical for America's future. It only takes a few minutes — and it can have a huge impact. #WeekOfAction ow.ly/m0oO50VN0Nm

✉️ It's time to speak up for science! Kick off our Week of Action by writing to your members of Congress. Urge them to robustly fund space science in FY 2026 & beyond. Every letter makes a difference! You can use our prompts for inspiration. #WeekOfAction aas.org/advocacy/get...

More urgent than ever, now is the time to call up your congresspeople (see e.g. AAS guide if you want): aas.org/urge-nasa-su...

Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature. https://go.nature.com/44Ugf9V

Paper day! 🔥 Check out our newly published article on the discovery of a candidate hyperluminous X-ray source using Chandra: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... #XraysAreTheBestRays

Happy birthday, Hubble! 🧪 🛰️ www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...

Normalizing the very normal in professional (& male-dominated) spaces — at this point, my work clothes can no longer hide the bump 🤷‍♀️ 😊 (Also yes, I have a walking pad… no, I am not weird)