In continued celebration of a decade of GW detections, some of the @vanderbilt.edu astrophysicists made this fun explainer video. We had a great time making this; just the right amount of cheesy delivery. My students have already gotten a kick out of it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkt...

Gravitational waves explained by Vanderbilt's top experts | College of Arts and Science

YouTube video by Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science

youtube.com

Astronomers, do you know where Seyfert (of active galaxy fame) worked? Vanderbilt, in Nashville. Where he was also, apparently, a tv weather guy! I know this thanks to a DELIGHTFUL visit to the Vandy Astro group! Thanks to @stevertaylor.bsky.social & everyone else, from undergrads to faculty! 🔭

My research group (aka VIPER) visited our High Performance Computing facility @vanderbilt.edu. An incredibly impressive operation, and very exciting to see the investments in GPUs for AI and scientific computing. As for the picture below, I just wanted to look cool with some servers... 🚀🔭🧪⚛️💫🪐

Very honored to have been named a Chancellor Faculty Fellow by Vanderbilt University in recognition of my ongoing drive to push the boundaries of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astrophysics! (They used a photo of me from 2019 though...😆) 🧪🔭🚀🪐⚛️💫 news.vanderbilt.edu/2025/05/01/1...

11 Vanderbilt faculty members selected as 2025 Chancellor Faculty Fellows

Eleven outstanding faculty members from across the university have been selected for the 2025 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. Each fellow holds the title of Chancellor Faculty Fellow and receive...

news.vanderbilt.edu

A fun and productive LISA Science Team meeting at NASA Goddard! Our team is tasked with stewarding the mission toward maximizing its science outcomes. We’re really digging into our various tasks now; we even got to see prototypes of some of the laser and optics assembles. 🧪⚛️🔭

TENURE UNLOCKED 🎓🚀🧪⚛️🔭

I don't know why it makes me cringe so much when I hear a theorist refer to their research group as a lab. But it does. Where are your instruments, test tubes, and such?

🔬 New paper from my group in The Astrophysical Journal! “Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary Population” by Nima Laal, introduces a normalizing flow emulator for the GW background signal from supermassive black hole binaries. A big step forward! @nanograv.bsky.social 🧪🔭⚛️🪐

Amazing work from Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow, Nima Laal. Wonderful to see this published. Answering "what if you searched for everything, everywhere, all at once" in pulsar-timing array gravitational wave searches. A gigantic Gibbs sampling hierarchical fit. 🔭🧪🪐 journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...

Rewatching the 1999 blockbuster The Mummy. I love this movie, it’s vibe, it’s soundtrack, everything. But when the mummy steals the eyes of the bespectacled grave plunderer, why does the mummy not subsequently need glasses?

Professor Sarah Vigeland of UWM gives an invited plenary in the Kavli Special Session at APS. Fantastic talk! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

Xavi Siemens gets his APS Fellow on! Highly deserved and great to see! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

My student Levi Schult absolutely smashed their talk today on comparing different detection techniques for the first single GW signal expected to be found by PTAs. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

Dr Nima Laal, postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt in my group, tells us all about sampling data covariance matrices with Inverse Wishart distributions— everything everywhere all at once! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

My student William Lamb @astrolamb.bsky.social updates us on some ambitious analytic calculations he’s been doing to model discrete binary and cosmic variance in the ensemble distribution of the stochastic GW background. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

Great talk by my student Kyle Gersbach on directional power-based searches for supermassive binary black holes in PTA data! @dgrav.org

Learning about history of Loop Quantum Gravity. Awesome ideas. Terminology of the morning is Quantum Riemannian Geometry. Plus, curvature at Planck scale is 1e76 larger than at horizon of Solar Mass Black hole. Amazing. @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org

✈️ Off to Anaheim for the APS 2025 Global Summit! Looking forward to some exciting talks, support my students and postdocs, cheering on NANOGrav folks, and delivering two talks on PTAs and LISA! 💫 @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org @nanograv.bsky.social @lisacommunity.bsky.social

This is good and beautiful. (Except for time flowing downwards from the top, which makes me dizzy.)

Nick Sousanis@nsousanis.bsky.social · 2y ago

At last! Finished page: how a star forms, what fuels it, & how it forges new forms into being! A star is a momentary reversal - a wellspring of possibilities that makes life possible. This took me some time to figure out to say the least - but geeked to be done & move onward! #Nostos #Unflattening 2

@royalsociety.org why are you still honouring Elon Musk with a Fellowship of your society? He and his cronies are tearing down US science, blocked USAid that’ll result in the deaths of thousands from disease, and supports the Far Right. Why still honour him?? 🔭🧪⚛️ royalsociety.org/people/elon-...

Congratulations to Priya on this amazing achievement!

Paul Guinnessy@paulguinnessy.bsky.social · 2y ago

Priyamvada Natarajan is the winner of the 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for #Astrophysics. Natarajan was selected for her groundbreaking contributions to advancing our understanding of dark matter substructure in galaxy clusters, the formation and fueling of black holes. ww2.aip.org/aip/awards/p...

Huge congratulations to Maura McLaughlin, Xavier Siemens, and all of NANOGrav on being awarded the 2025 Rossi Prize by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the @aasoffice.bsky.social! It's wonderful that this field is being recognized. But there's much more to come from PTAs! 🔭 💫

OK, let's see if I can properly follow the instructions my grad student gave me to sign up to the astronomy feed here... @bot.astronomy.blue signup

Honored that the @nanograv.bsky.social paper reporting evidence for gravitational waves, co-led by Dr. Sarah Vigeland and me, is one of IOP's top cited papers. This reflects the incredible work of NANOGrav (and indeed the entire IPTA) in advancing GW astronomy. ioppublishing.org/north-americ...

The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background - IOPscienceSearchopens in new tabopens in new tabopens in new tabopens in new tab

The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background, Gabriella Agazie, Akash Anumarlapudi, Anne M. Archibald, Zaven Arzoumanian, Paul T. Baker, Bence Bécsy, Laura Blecha, Adam Brazier, Paul R. Brook, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, Rand Burnette, Robin Case, Maria Charisi, Shami Chatterjee, Katerina Chatziioannou, Belinda D. Cheeseboro, Siyuan Chen, Tyler Cohen, James M. Cordes, Neil J. Cornish, Fronefield Crawford, H. Thankful Cromartie, Kathryn Crowter, Curt J. Cutler, Megan E. DeCesar, Dallas DeGan, Paul B. Demorest, Heling Deng, Timothy Dolch, Brendan Drachler, Justin A. Ellis, Elizabeth C. Ferrara, William Fiore, Emmanuel Fonseca, Gabriel E. Freedman, Nate Garver-Daniels, Peter A. Gentile, Kyle A. Gersbach, Joseph Glaser, Deborah C. Good, Kayhan Gültekin, Jeffrey S. Hazboun, Sophie Hourihane, Kristina Islo, Ross J. Jennings, Aaron D. Johnson, Megan L. Jones, Andrew R. Kaiser, David L. Kaplan, Luke Zoltan Kelley, Matthew Kerr, Joey S. Key, Tonia C. Klein, Nima Laal, Michael T. Lam, William G. Lamb, T. Joseph W. Lazio, Natalia Lewandowska, Tyson B. Littenberg, Tingting Liu, Andrea Lommen, Duncan R. Lorimer, Jing Luo, Ryan S. Lynch, Chung-Pei Ma, Dustin R. Madison, Margaret A. Mattson, Alexander McEwen, James W. McKee, Maura A. McLaughlin, Natasha McMann, Bradley W. Meyers, Patrick M. Meyers, Chiara M. F. Mingarelli, Andrea Mitridate, Priyamvada Natarajan, Cherry Ng, David J. Nice, Stella Koch Ocker, Ken D. Olum, Timothy T. Pennucci, Benetge B. P. Perera, Polina Petrov, Nihan S. Pol, Henri A. Radovan, Scott M. Ransom, Paul S. Ray, Joseph D. Romano, Shashwat C. Sardesai, Ann Schmiedekamp, Carl Schmiedekamp, Kai Schmitz, Levi Schult, Brent J. Shapiro-Albert, Xavier Siemens, Joseph Simon, Magdalena S. Siwek, Ingrid H. Stairs, Daniel R. Stinebring, Kevin Stovall, Jerry P. Sun, Abhimanyu Susobhanan, Joseph K. Swiggum, Jacob Taylor, Stephen R. Taylor, Jacob E. Turner, Caner Unal, Michele Vallisneri, Rutger van Haasteren, Sarah J. Vigeland, Haley M. Wahl, Qiaohong Wang, Caitlin A. Witt, Olivia Young, The NANOGrav Collaboration

iopscience.iop.org

It’s becoming more obvious to me when people use ChatGPT to write statements. I realize the concept of adversarial networks makes this seem unlikely, yet there’s a style and tone that sticks out. Problematic when these statements are for elected roles.

So honored to have given a talk at the IoA’s 50th Anniversary Conference at Cambridge, where I earned my PhD. This was in July, but the talks are now online. Earlier this year, I was privileged to deliver the Eddington Lecture there as well. Watch my lecture here: youtu.be/pLOQ6e6Ip08

Hunting supermassive black-hole binaries – Stephen Taylor

YouTube video by Cambridge University Astronomy

youtu.be

🚀 New research alert! My postdoc, Dr. Nima Laal, just put out a great new paper: “Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black-Hole Binary Population” 🌌. He developed a normalizing-flow emulator to tackle challenges in understanding the GW background. 🔗 Check it out: arxiv.org/abs/2411.10519

Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black-hole Binary Population

While supermassive black-hole (SMBH)-binaries are not the only viable source for the low-frequency gravitational wave background (GWB) signal evidenced by the most recent pulsar timing array (PTA) dat...

arxiv.org

🚨 New paper! Very proud of my student Polina Petrov, who just submitted the first paper of her PhD --> arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04409

Neat! Gaia spots a 33 solar mass black hole in the Milky Way! www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow... BH3 matches what is quite common in our gravitational-wave observations, but had yet to be discovered in our own galaxy Paper: doi.org/10.1051/0004... 🔭🧪

Abstract submission for the LISA Symposium closes on the 20th of April. This year the Symposium has parallel sessions allowing for a wide range of talks. If your research relates to LISA in any way then there is a place for your work at the Symposium. Register at: www.lisasymposium2024.ie