Not exactly refreshing, original, or as edgy as it seems to end a talk on a confirmation of the “publish or perish” mentality. ECRs should take this as informative about one person’s attitude, one which is not necessarily broadly shared in modern astrophysics culture #NAM2026

To those at the #NAM2026 plenary hearing things like “and that’s when I knew we were going to win [over other survey teams]”, know that you can do brilliant science in a collaborative and mutually encouraging way, rather than treating everyone else as a competitor. We decide/set our culture. 🔭

We are running a crisis mapping project to identify road blockages in Venezuela following the earthquakes. It’s been cloudy, which obscures satellite imagery, but there are some clear areas to classify right now: www.zooniverse.org/projects/ali...

Road Blockage and Bridge Damage | Planetary Response Network: Venezuela Earthquake 2026 | Zooniverse - People-powered research

Help humanitarians deliver aid in Venezuela

zooniverse.org

We are running a crisis mapping project to identify road blockages in Venezuela following the earthquakes. It’s been cloudy, which obscures satellite imagery, but there are some clear areas to classify right now: www.zooniverse.org/projects/ali...

Road Blockage and Bridge Damage | Planetary Response Network: Venezuela Earthquake 2026 | Zooniverse - People-powered research

Help humanitarians deliver aid in Venezuela

zooniverse.org

Is there a word for the descent from contentment into dread that comes from realising your recent peaceful productivity is only because you hadn’t reopened your Slack/Teams/etc since rebooting your work computer? Maybe something in German?

Dear Avi,

Josh Mayfield@bean525.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'd REALLY appreciate it if anyone who sees this would try out my text generators so I can iron out any remaining bugs. Please, and thank you! trek.epicrandomness.com

Tag yourself, I’ve evolved out of Jenneniamur and am now a Vole Dwarf at about 0.1 0^-6 luminosity

Linn Boldt-Christmas@nplinnspace.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

Hi Bluesky, a question. Below is an attempt to explain why this bot reports the “lookback time” instead of a physical distance to each galaxy. Is it a helpful analogy? (Thank you. This non-bot post written by @vrooje.net) 🔭🧪

All the Galaxies!@allthegalaxies.galaxyzoo.org · 4mo ago

As an analogy, picture an ant on a balloon. The ant is going to walk from point A to point B *while someone is inflating the balloon*. Once it arrives, how far did it travel? No measurement with a ruler would get it quite right. But the time the ant walked for, plus its speed, works. (3/3)

If I were a recipient of this letter and my job was to support UK research and innovation, I’d be pretty embarrassed right now. If I were also the Astronomer Royal, being told my lack of consultation with the community was “wholly unacceptable”? Yikes. committees.parliament.uk/publications...

Reposting this as it seems especially relevant to UK physics and astro right now. A thread with documentation of why curiosity-driven research should be supported by governments. 🔭🧪

Robert McNees@mcnees.bsky.social · 2y ago

I’ve seen some posts recently, about the value of basic research, in light of funding cuts and demands that research have immediate economic justification. Let me collect some info here, in a thread, about why it’s a bad idea to attach those sorts of demands to funding. 🧵 🧪 ⚛️

I remember May 2020 course feedback from my students thanking me for doing my best. I was so grateful to them for giving me grace to be a fellow human going through COVID *with* them. I don’t know the details of this claim, but I suspect only the lawyers are likely to see meaningful compensation.

Rebecca Williams@volcanologist.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The news about students seeking compensation from universities for COVID teaching has made me quite sad. I can't say what happened at those universities, or what those student's experience was. My present university did not appear to be in the list. But what I can say is...

Sure here u go

Lip Sync Battle - Tom Holland

YouTube video by Comedy Central Latinoamérica

youtu.be

Merry Christmas from this galaxy specifically 🎄🌀🌌🔭

All the Galaxies!@allthegalaxies.galaxyzoo.org · 7mo ago

A barred spiral galaxy, observed with the Apache Point 2.5m Telescope in the SDSS survey. It is at redshift 0.008 (lookback time 114.4 million years) with coordinates (144.74661, 6.95544). 45 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo 2.

It is time for universities — not just staff and student unions, but the senior management too — to admit out loud that this government is actively trying to make universities fail. We *all* need to come together and collectively try to fight their attempts to loot and pillage.

George Mann@sgfmann.bsky.social · 9mo ago

i: Reeves to unveil £600m raid on foreign student university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday

We are live for a crisis mapping project post-Melissa! Excellent thread by Izzy below on the details and how to join ( planetaryresponsenetwork.org ) A lot of the methods we use to accurately crowdsource this mapping are derived from astrophysics citizen science work like @galaxyzoo.org 🔭🌎

Izzy Garland@izgarland.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🧪 One of the groups I'm in does disaster relief, and we're mobilising for Hurricane Melissa. Short version, go to www.zooniverse.org/projects/ali..., help classify images of the aftermath, multiple people look at each image, we make maps and send them to rescue workers! Share if you can!!

This is on the rise as large projects with large teams become more common. When I was a postdoc I separated my CV publist into “led and supervised”, “major contributor”, and “team contributor” sub-lists. When I’m reading CVs for a job panel, I appreciate similar sub-structures.

Sarah Hörst@planetdr.bsky.social · 9mo ago

So I’m reviewing *post doc applications* and so far I’ve seen multiple applications with 30-80 papers. Astronomy what are you doing.

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815. 🧪 🎃 The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but he showed them all in 1872 when he announced that he had created a MONSTER. Let's learn about the terrible thing he did. Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

When I was leading an interdisciplinary collaboration and my name would have been last for “funded this” reasons, I happily ceded that position to a valued colleague whose field elevates last authorship (mine doesn’t). It was a win-win at the time, which Google will now punish me for? Coolcoolcool

Lara K. Mahal@glycocode.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🧪For those of us who do complex collaborations with multiple corresponding authors this is terrible . I suspect it will also hit female authors disproportionately as they tend to have more collaborations across fields…https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03281-4

Forgot to add the 🔭 🧪 for the feeds, and ran out of characters to note in this reply that this would all be happening as we get cooked by the photosphere of the Sun as it expands into its Red Giant phase

All the Galaxies!@allthegalaxies.galaxyzoo.org · 11mo ago

If the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in ~5 Gyr, it will initially look a lot like this. And scientists have images simulating the sky from Earth (about 3 minutes in) youtu.be/qnYCpQyRp-4?... Our own @drbecky.bsky.social has a video on the possible collision too: youtu.be/BxylLJj5y4s?...

Me: this is great, glad to see authors ripped off by AI getting their due. Me after using the search tool: I am one of these ripped off authors. Academics, it only takes a minute. Seven of my papers are in this and I had no idea.

Alex de Campi@alexdecampi.bsky.social · 11mo ago

There are tons of graphic novels, academic papers, film and TV scripts, & prose novels/nonfiction on the LibGen list Anthropic used. As settlement approaches, make it easy for the class action lawyers to contact you! Here’s how Part 1: is your work in Libgen? www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

This image of a young planet clearing its orbit in the protoplanetary disk around a distant star (the star itself is obscured) is stunning. Of course it’s beautiful, but it’s also a remarkable technical achievement for the study authors, the observatory, and the instrument scientists. Well done!

ESO@eso.org · 11mo ago

A very hungry planet! 🪐 What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞 Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets 📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

It's paper day! We use our Ōtautahi-Oxford model of the Galaxy's interstellar object population to understand the origins of 3I/ATLAS, from only its velocity @astrohopkins.bsky.social, Dorsey, @redshiftless.bsky.social, @astrokiwi.bsky.social, @chrislintott.bsky.social & Leicester, submitted A 🧵🔭

From a Different Star: 3I/ATLAS in the context of the Ōtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model

The discovery of the third interstellar object (ISO), 3I/ATLAS (`3I'), provides a rare chance to directly observe a small body from another Solar System. Studying its chemistry and dynamics will add t...

arxiv.org

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · last yr.

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.

Reason #1 why I am 'violently angry' about AI: A huge amount of the work to train these models has been outsourced to a hidden, low-paid African workforce. It's modern-day economic colonialism another way. E.g.: 1. restofworld.org/2025/big-tec... 2. www.wired.com/story/low-pa...

The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’

African workers who label AI data or screen social posts for US tech giants are calling on President Biden to raise their plight with Kenya's president, William Ruto, who visits the US this week.

wired.com

A new, thorough reanalysis of the data that led to claims of biosignatures on K2-18b from @luiswel.bsky.social & friends - a nicely written lesson on why this stuff is hard. They find no significant evidence for DMS, the gas the Cambridge team claimed to have found. arxiv.org/abs/2504.21788

The Challenges of Detecting Gases in Exoplanet Atmospheres

Claims of detections of gases in exoplanet atmospheres often rely on comparisons between models including and excluding specific chemical species. However, the space of molecular combinations availabl...

arxiv.org

A barred spiral galaxy, observed with the Apache Point 2.5m Telescope in the SDSS survey. It is at redshift 0.018 (lookback time 257.3 million years) with coordinates (141.53929, 49.31021). 33 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo 2.

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

RAS members: *please* vote in the elections (check your inbox), and please read the **CVs** of the council nominees. One has a vaguely plausible statement and a CV screed that makes clear they will be actively hostile to certain vulnerable community members. Please vote to show that isn’t us! ☄️🔭🚩🚩🚩

RAS members: *please* vote in the elections (check your inbox), and please read the **CVs** of the council nominees. One has a vaguely plausible statement and a CV screed that makes clear they will be actively hostile to certain vulnerable community members. Please vote to show that isn’t us! ☄️🔭🚩🚩🚩

Matt and Izzy both did excellent work in this paper!

Izzy Garland@izgarland.bsky.social · last yr.

It's paper day! We've been using HST data to investigate some of the most luminous AGN in the most bulgeless galaxies at low redshift. The majority of this work was done by @vrooje.net's masters student, Matthew Fahey. academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...