This was super fun to work on! In particular, I deep-dived into the expansion of the arXiverse, which was a very meta exploration of the past few decades of astronomers “yeeting papers into the void”

My last official bite as a regular author 🥹 so grateful to have written for astrobites over the past few years & excited to see what the new generation of authors brings!

🧪 Another case of using gamma-rays to track down cosmic rays, but this time from starburst galaxy M 82, aka the cigar galaxy 🚬🌟

Registration ends Feb. 15! 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

We encourage *all* professional astronomers/astrophysicists to attend (in person or remotely)!

More at pictureanastronomer.github.io/symposium

Observation of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino with KM3NeT - Nature A very high-energy muon observed by the KM3NeT experiment in the Mediterranean Sea is evidence for the interaction of an exceptionally high-energy neutrino of cosmic origin.  

Neutrino of the energy of 120 PeV (Petaelectron-volt)! That’s a lot. Got a theory for that? 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We didn’t see any gammas from the source and can conclude that the AGN in question probably isn’t emitting neutrinos or that maybe the way it’s doing it is something different from what we currently understand. We did detect a bunch of X-rays from the source for the first time though, which is cool!

So anyway, we got an alert from IceCube saying that a bunch of neutrinos were coming from a known gamma-ray source and we got excited. Pinpointing neutrino sources is also important because we don’t get a lot of neutrinos so it’s hard to tell where they come from

We can’t directly trace cosmic rays back to their birthplaces because they get spun off by magnetic fields (since they’re charged but gammas and neutrinos aren’t, so they’ll point right back to where they came from)

We think that gamma-rays and neutrinos of pretty high energies might be made in the same place — this is important because it would be a smoking gun signal for cosmic rays also being made in these places

This paper has been in the works since very early in my MSc (I’m now a second year PhD) — after like 18 months of reviews by a lot of large collaborations, we finally got this out into the world!!

Summary below but tl;dr: do gammas and neitrinos come from the same place? Not this time! 🧪🔭

Another astrobite in my series of “where are we making all these cosmic rays??” themed bites. This is a theory paper that looks at modelling a scenario where all the cosmic rays at really high energies are made in our nearest AGN, Centaurus A 🔭🧪

Just got a story approved to run on Monday on the crisis happening at the NSF.

If you are an NSF-funded scientist and have been personally impacted by the funding pause this week, I'd love to hear from you.

Reach me securely on Signal: 3162958947

I’m a grad student and science communicator studying astronomy and would like to share about my work and make science more accessible

Yes

ORCID

Hi! I’m a physics phd student orcid.org/0000-0002-27...

U.S. Spacewalk 91 - NASA+ Coverage of International Space Station U.S. Spacewalk 91 (spacewalk is scheduled to begin at appx. 8 a.m. EST).

Astronauts are currently on an EVA to repair NICER! 🔭✨ #AAS245
plus.nasa.gov/scheduled-vi...

+ highland cows ofc!!

Cat begrudgingly wearing a crocheted hat

happy new years i made my cat a hat and she hates it

can light travel faster than the speed of light? probably not but we can use all the times we saw light travelling at regular speed to constrain that new physics probably isn’t happening

yes I am a “100 tab across multiple browser” person but I don’t think I’ve ever closed a phone tab and now I’m scared

i like just getting the email digest! very low tech but easy to quickly read through all the abstracts

An M dwarf star with the text: "I am not a toy. I am not a Christmas present. I am a 10 trillion year commitment"

Think twice before gifting someone an M dwarf this holiday season

I always make homemade vegetarian pierogis — a bit time consuming but I grew up on polish Christmas dinner and they’re sooooo good

i reallllly want a work/life balance so badly but like how do I do that if I have a conference the first week of january??!! my unfinished slides and buggy code are actively haunting me

A comic called "What City Pigeons Talk About". Two city pigeons are standing on the sidewalk. One says "Hey, do you ever think about the past?" The other says "The past?"

A closeup of the first pigeon. They say "Yeah - do you ever think about where we came from? Sometimes I forget that city pigeons are domestic animals."

A hand reaches out to three wild pigeons. The narrator pigeon says "Humans domesticated us many millennia ago in the Middle East. We provided meat, feces used for fertilizer, and much more." There are two very fancy pigeon breeds. "Over time, people split us into hundreds of pure breeds - some quite elaborate! Kings and queens proudly kept pigeons, and colonists spread us worldwide."

A closeup again of the first pigeon, who says, "But we fell out of fashion. Now we peck at the dusty concrete, our past glory all but forgotten. Do you ever think about that?"

Another thing I made this year. Pigeon history!

pls appreciate that I put a hat on the observatory (and pray for me that it is somehow not cloudy for my event :))

there’s a lot of other great work ppl do and that we do in my dept, but I just want to point out that before you attack people who do this sort of work, these are the kinds of programs that you’re attacking 🫶

& yes I think it’s “cool” when we make careers in physics/academia available and inclusive to anyone who wants to do them.

addressing some anti-DEI bs - here’s just some of the DEI work I’m fortunate to do:
- making teaching resources that include underrep. physicists
- establishing a food pantry for grad students w/ financial stress
- bringing telescopes and physics labs to remote and underserved communities

Our sky cameras - you *should* be able to see like ~100 stars here

The single gamma we saw after 15 minutes of observations (gamma-ray fluxes are low but like not this low)

observing day 10/10(!) terrible weather, sat in the control room all night to follow up a gravitational wave through the clouds ☁️