And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!
Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!
We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!
I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia
This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who revolutionized our understanding of what stars & the Universe are made of, was born #OTD in 1900.
In 1926, she wrote what is considered the "undoubtedly most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
She continued in the same spirit - only to be denied a professorship (or even the a proper astronomer position). She finally became a professor at Harvard at 1956(!) & first woman to chair a department.
News Alert: New image of the famous supermassive black hole in M87. The image was taken a year later and reveals the same rings size and shadow shape, confirming our results from 2019! The intensity maximum has rotated however. Not surprising, since matter rotates around a black hole. It is actually now, where you expect it to be.
It quacks like a BH, it looks like a BH, it is a BH!
The University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is hiring software engineers for science data processing on the Data Systems team. We build satellite borne instruments for studying astrophysics, planetary science, earth science, atmospheric science, and many more disciplines. Data Systems typically does the ground processing of the instrument data from binary packets through to research quality science data products (think netCDF, HDF5, CDF, FITS files). Mostly we use Python but we have some Java systems and C experience is always a plus for making Python faster.
1/ Most massive stellar #BlackHole in our galaxy found! With 33 times the mass of the Sun, this is the most massive black hole formed after the collapse of a star that we've found so far in the #MilkyWay.
ESA's Gaia mission found it via the wobble it induces on a star orbiting it, and data from ground-based telescopes helped confirm its mass and elucidate how it formed.
Explanation: Why would clouds form a hexagon on Saturn? Nobody is sure... nobody has ever seen anything like it anywhere else in the Solar System. Acquiring its first sunlit views of far northern Saturn in late 2012, the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera recorded this stunning, false-color image of the ringed planet's north pole.
"Almost all the satellites you can see with your eyes now are Starlinks. Nicely demonstrated in this awful/beautiful photo: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220614.html "
Thank you Prof. Lawler for continuing to remind the world of the catastrophe unfolding in low earth orbit.
We have two faculty positions in #astrophysics and #astronomy open. Minorities are particularly encouraged to apply. You will meet wonderful colleagues and an excellent, caring and inspiring atmosphere.
We're making great progress with ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope in #Chile, it's now half completed! Not just the dome – work on other components such as the mirrors, control system, scientific instruments and support infrastructure is advancing at good pace.
To celebrate the recovery of communications with #Voyager2, here is a bunch of classic Science Magazine, Nature, and Nature Astronomy covers featuring the adventures of the epic spacecraft, now located 19.9 billion kilometers away from Earth 🌍 📡 🚀
100 years ago tonight: Edwin Hubble discovers the Universe
This photographic glass plate captured by Edwin Hubble on October 6, 1923, at Carnegie’s Mount Wilson Observatory forever changed our understanding of the universe and paved the way for modern astronomy.
It is a red hypergiant 3,000 light years away nearing the end of its life. Weighing in at 19x the mass of the sun, it is glowing 100k times brighter and is 1k times the diameter of our sun!
It is expected to supernova (implode) sometime relatively soon, and will likely collapse into a black hole when this occurs.
This target isn’t frequently imaged which is a shame.
Yesterday I gave my first PhD talk at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Science Meeting on my fav millisecond pulsar - PSR J1713+0747.
The pulsar that threw a tantrum!
Millisecond pulsars are used in pulsar timing arrays as they’re considered stable rotators over the long term. That is vote to helping us search for gravitational wave backgrounds - the big news that we announced last week.
But this very well know millisecond pulsar decided to undergo a massive magnetospheric reconfiguration in 2021 - only the second millisecond pulsar that we know off to exhibit this strange behavior!
In my PhD I will be exploring to see why this happened and if other millisecond pulsars might be doing this on a smaller scale. Maybe they’re not do stable, after all … ask me again in three years!
A spherical shell-like structure 1 billion light-years in diameter named Ho’oleilana is discovered in the distribution of relatively nearby galaxies. We posit this is the 1st observation of an individual Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO).
Tomorrow we get the first images from Euclid, a new space telescope located at the Earth's L2 Lagrange point.
Euclid, the explorer of dark matter, will make a 3D-map of the cosmos by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since my childhood and illuminates my views of the natural and human worlds. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to the development of my increasingly alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.
However, paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises instead of doing astrophysics. After much weighing of what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, I have finally “looked up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, and have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand and mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, on Earth.
Why ? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, my personal views of astrophysics & astronomy have evolved to become quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people and intellectually challenging and exciting. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our position, both insignificant and precarious, on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered questions, of lesser importance I think, and more or less interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making any significant difference to human progress, knowledge, and well-being in relation to our environment. Most of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated, overhyped academic research and industrial-scale scientific publication. Working on such questions make us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by accumulated experience, is that we are nowhere near to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on most of these. Why then waste our energy and time on these questions, most of them quite insignificant – when exceptional times invite us to focus our intellect on more pressing issues ? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, in the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my professional efforts myself on not even being wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a major existential issue for me.
Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of doubtful informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities ! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable for a field that is nowhere near essential to document and help solve our environmental crises. However, despite a rising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change that at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting, core research activities, and to downscale significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources, especially on the engineering side. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding in front of our eyes. Here too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am saying this lightly.
Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential crisis and boredom, having the feeling of having done everything I could and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future career directions. I have honestly grown tired of astrophysical sciences, its research practices, and of my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything significant there. I feel both useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time to use my energy and experience to serve more important research causes before I get too old and intellectually rotten, modestly and with whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of 44. What better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensitivity for nature, mountains, and complex patterns of the natural world ?
This place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a (scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious) transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoistic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), but also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, and maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of an activivist too, to contribute to instill through some logical arguments some sense of emergency and questioning among some of my colleagues less sensitive to these issues.
How, when, where all of this is going to happen, what is going to be posted in this place, that will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then to tell me/us about your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate or experience-sharing. What is important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us up all to help us better understand our place and role as humans and sometimes scientists, both as part of, and powerful actors (for the best or the worst) of our earthly natural world. This kind of conversation, in my view, is more than ever needed (actually, well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information and through-the-roof political irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times, preserving the physical wonder that is nature and life on the pale blue dot.
Did you know, we have a detector the size of the Galaxy?! But what the heck can we use it for?
Well, we're looking for the gravitational wave background, and we're using pulsars to do it!
In part three of this series, I take a dive into what Pulsar Timing Arrays are, some of the challenges they face & how they can improve their sensitivity.
This year, there will be a nova, before or by September, as bright as the North Star.
After peak brightness it will remain bright enough, for several days, to observe with binoculars.
You can help research scientists with observational details.
#JWST is often cited for its amazing work with galaxies, BUT LOOK AT IT DISSECTING UP THE CRAB NEBULA AND SHOWING US STAR GUTS FROM A 1000-YEAR OLD STELLAR DETONATION.
Wow! Look at the pulsar!
So epic that we can see this detail, the different structures, elements, velocities, energies, etc. from an event that Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed and documented 1000 years back.
We're connected through time with this event to them!