A cartoon of a 10th birthday cake being swallowed by a black hole.
Happy birthday to GW150914, our first (of many) #GravitationalWave discoveries, detected 10 years ago today!
#GW10Years 🧪⚛️🔭
🖼️: @chirpmass.bsky.social
Just a few days before the 10th anniversary of gravitational wave detection, the @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration is happy to announce a new major detection 📣 The signal, named GW250114, has provided us with the best observational proof to date of Stephen Hawking's black hole area theorem 🕳️🕳
What a difference a decade makes! Announcing the clearest #GravitationalWave detection ever #GW250114
youtu.be/2XmZ8-XQ9jU
📓: doi.org/10.1103/kw5g...
🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #O4IsHere
New masses in the stellar graveyard plot, showing astronomical observations of black holes and neutron stars. The number of gravitational-wave observations of black holes is overwhelming. The plot is arranged to look nice, the horizontal axis has no meaning, but the vertical one shows masses. We have a significant range of masses from about 1 solar mass to over 200 solar masses for our largest merger remnant. New out today is a neutron star black hole binary GW230518_125908, as well as a lot of binary black holes.
Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today!
We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discoveries of black holes and neutron stars
📰 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082
🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #GWTC4
An image with a black hole merger in the background. The text reads "128 new mergers revealed: LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA GWTC-4.0".
128 new mergers between black holes and neutron stars.
Today we're revealing the biggest ever update to our count of gravitational wave detections. New data from May 2023 to January 2024 has more than doubled the number we've seen.
🧵 1/3
@ligo.org #Virgo #KAGRA #GravitationalWaves 🔭 #GWTC-4 #O4a
An infographic titled "How BIG are the BLACK HOLES we find with GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?" by @astronerdika. The graphic displays a range of black hole masses detected via gravitational waves, categorized by their size in solar masses (mass of the Sun) and represented with playful cat-like black hole illustrations. The categories from left to right are: 1. "<5 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "smol" - Very small black hole illustration represented by a curled up black cat - Arrow pointing left: "THIS WAY TO NEUTRON STARS" - Example: "Big component of GW230529 (~3.6 times the mass of the Sun)" 2. "~10 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "basic" - Slightly larger black hole cat illustration - Caption: "LOTS OF BLACK HOLES" 3. "~35–45 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "hefty" - Bigger black hole cat illustration - Continues the idea of a populated range 4. ">60 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "chonky" - Large black hole cat illustration - Caption: "FORBIDDEN TERRITORY? (can these even be made from the collapse of star cores?!)" - Example: "Components of GW190521 (~85 + ~66 times the mass of the Sun)" 5. ">100 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "oh lawd" - Very large, curled-up black hole cat illustration - Arrow pointing right: "THIS WAY TO INTERMEDIATE MASS BLACK HOLES" - Example: "Components of GW231123 (~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun)" Below the categories is a stylized black curve representing the inferred population of black holes detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. It rises sharply in the "basic" range and falls off toward the "hefty" and "chonky" ranges, with a note reading: "this curve is an artistic representation of the black hole population inferred by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA." This infographic draws from the “Chonky Cat” meme.
Heard the latest news from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration? We detected the collision of the most massive pair of black holes so far: #GW231123 weighing in at ~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun!
So to celebrate, here’s a handy chart ✨
Just how chonky are these black holes? 🤔
We are excited to announce the discovery of #GW231123, a gravitational-wave signal from the merger of two high-mass black holes to form one about 190–265 times the mass of our Sun
ligo.org/ligo-virgo-k...
#O4IsHere 🔭🧪☄️
Detector dashboard showing all five detectors happily in Observing status
The gang are all here! Today we resumed our fourth observing run with LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, Virgo, KAGRA and GEO all observing together!
You can check detector status live at online.ligo.org
☄️🔭🧪
From Astrobites: There is a tradition in Astronomy to post silly science papers to the arXiv on Aprils Fools day. We’ve collected them all for 2025 and provided some “peer review”. 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/04/03/a...
Exciting news! We’re thrilled to announce that tapir Yuna gave birth to a rare and endangered Malayan tapir calf Sunday night. The newborn, covered in distinctive white spots and stripes resembling a fuzzy walking watermelon, is only the second tapir born in our 120-year history.
Image taken by BepiColombo during its sixth Mercury flyby. Planet Mercury is visible in the background with its grey, cratered, pock-marked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.
Image taken by BepiColombo during its sixth Mercury flyby. Planet Mercury is visible in the background with its grey, cratered, pock-marked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.
Image taken by BepiColombo during its sixth Mercury flyby. Planet Mercury is visible in the background with its grey, cratered, pock-marked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.
NEW IMAGES OF MERCURY FROM BEPICOLOMBO’S FLYBY YESTERDAY!!
SoCal friends, I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this. A few things I wish I’d known as we evacuated ahead of a wildfire (that took our home in 2021) 🧵
Artist concept of a M-dwarf star covered in star spots, orbited by a rocky planet. Image credit: Benoît Gougeon, Université de Montréal
Astronomy PhD opportunity at St Andrews 🔭
Interested in searching for rocky exoplanet atmospheres and understanding their host stars? 🪐✴️
Come join our new Exoplanet Atmospheres group at St Andrews in beautiful Scotland! 🏴
Deadline: 1 February
Project details ⬇️
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Lots of PhD friends ask me for career advice outside of academia. Posting here as this is one of the top takes, and relates to the larger take that you must compete to be hirable in a different profession. Lots of transferable stuff is good, but usually not sufficient
Here's Saturn's second-largest moon Rhea peeking through the upper atmosphere of larger moon Titan, imaged by Cassini on October 27, 2009.
A star-filled sky arches above a tent at Joshua Tree National Park. Image credit: NPS/Hannah Schwalbe
A tent under a starry night sky. Image credit: Josh Hild
camping under the stars would fix me
“Never underestimate your audience’s intelligence, always underestimate their vocabulary” is a rule I teach in my workshops.
And part of this is tone. Don’t act like your audience (family or not) is stupid for not knowing 15-syllable science words.
A headshot of a young woman with red hair and glasses with a branded Forbes under 30 frame that has her name (Sylvia Biscoveanu), position (postdoctoral researcher) and affiliation (Northwestern University)
I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been selected for the @forbes.com 30 Under 30 list in Science! I’m honored to be part of this amazing cohort of young scientists.
www.forbes.com/30-under-30/...
Pie chart: 74% hydrogen 25% helium 1% other (in tiny font)
Atoms are binary. They are either intended to be hydrogen or helium. We can't just scrap this worldview just because of a handful of exceptions
Less than two weeks to apply for our continuing (equivalent of tenure) position in astronomy/astrophysics at Monash! Position open to all areas.
aas.org/jobregister/...
You wanted starter packs to be searchable. Our engineers are busy keeping us online, so in the meantime, an independent developer built a new searchable library of starter packs. This is the beauty of building in the open 🦋
Two crows on beach rocks contemplate a red berry
Thoughtful crow on a pure white background
Handsome crow on white with a chuck of barnacles.
Crow strides across beach.
I can't begin to tell you people how hard it is to shoot under Seattle winter "light" conditions.
In any case, a few beach crows.
With many physicists arriving daily at Bluesky I’ve created a comprehensive list -which I update daily- with Cosmologists, Astrophysicists, Gravitational Wave Astronomers, Particle Physicists… Please SHARE so it reaches more people! 🤩 Warning: it may contain Mathematicians
bsky.app/profile/did:...
Can I be added please? Thanks!
I had a hard time finding women physicists here. So I made a starter pack for #female and #under-represended #minorities in #physics, in short #FURMIP.
Please spread the word and
let me know if you would like to be added.
go.bsky.app/2JeYsDz
BayesFlow is a library for amortized Bayesian inference with neural networks.
⋅ Multi-backend via Keras 3: Use PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
⋅ Modern nets: Flow matching, diffusion, consistency models, normalizing flows, transformers
⋅ Built-in diagnostics and plotting
🔗 github.com/bayesflow-or...
To accompany all those BlueSky science/academia #starterpacks, let’s share introductions to the literature of our fields
Gravitational-wave papers (created with observablehq.com/@guillaume-l...)
When the intro starts "We have opened a new window" you know you can skip a couple of paragraphs
Piggybacking to bump another one of my LaTeX contributions. If you want to put the ORCiD logo by your name, linked to your ORCiD page, then you can use my package:
\usepackage{orcidlink}
and then e.g.
Author Name \orcidlink{0000-0001-7559-9597}
That's it! That's the whole package! Link below.
Love astronomy, astrophysics, and science communication? Come join the Astrobites team! Applications due November 27th. ✨🔭
astrobites.org/2024/10/27/a...
Now...I have no skin in this game but I figured the ocean/marine/sea-creature science guys might enjoy it.
I'm mostly posting it for the ominous title...🧪
www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2472750...
