Rowina Nathan ✨

A portrait of Einstein and Hawking with a binary black hole in between. It is rather dramatic, and shows cool light-bending effects.

"Ten years ago, scientists heard the universe rumble for the first time. That first discovery of gravitational waves began a new era of astronomy."

@simon-stevenson.bsky.social writes about gravitational-wave astronomy today

theconversation.com/10-years-ago...

#GW10Years 🔭🧪⚛️

🖼️: C Knox

My cake decorating skills aren't quite there yet, BUT a HUGE congratulations to @astroteagan.bsky.social for submitting her PhD.

Milestone Moyal Medal awarded to astrophysicist Tamara Davis Professor Davis, an astrophysicist at UQ’s School of Mathematics, will receive the medal and deliver the 2025 Moyal Lecture on Thursday 9 October. Her lecture, titled ‘New light on dark energy: the…

Congratulations to OzGrav's Deputy Director, Professor Tamara Davis AM, recipient of the 2025 Moyal Medal awarded by Macquarie University for her outstanding contributions to astrophysics and cosmology.

Read more here: lighthouse.mq.edu.au/media-releas...

Front page news! 📰 Monash PhD researcher Christian Adamcwicz leads new LVK results revealing the mysterious 40 M☉ gap in black hole populations. Exciting clues about how the universe’s heaviest stars live and die! #BlackHoles #LVK #Astrophysics www.theaustralian.com.au/science/grav...

Look at 'em all!

It's like a big blue Phoenix rising from the ashes of a sea of massive compact objects that slammed together to shake the very fabric of the cosmos!

👀👀👀

🔭

The side effects are nuts, it’s always a difficult cost benefit analysis and I miss my life before.

2 years into my long covid journey. Finding it very difficult to do science at the level I’d like 🫠

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

I have like 4 weeks!

GWTC-4.0: An Introduction to Version 4.0 of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog The Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC) is a collection of short-duration (transient) gravitational wave signals identified by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration in gravitational-wave data pro...

The O4a results (GWTC-4) of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA are now out 🥳

We have 128 new candidates of which 86 have a false alarm rate of less this 1 per year

The new catalog results arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082

Update on black hole and neutron star population arxiv.org/abs/2508.18083

GWTC-4.0: An Introduction to Version 4.0 of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog The Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC) is a collection of short-duration (transient) gravitational wave signals identified by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration in gravitational-wave data pro...

The results of the 4th Gravitational Wave observing run are out! 👀 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18080, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18081, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18083, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18079

Yes! I was super chuffed. Thank you so much.

Amazing!!!!

A series of radial solid lines, followed by binary encoded dashes and vertical stripes. The radial lines encode the distance to the pulsars, the binary stripes encode the pulsar period and period derivative. THere is a key in the top right that indicates the scales used. The title says "Millisecond Pulsar Map - August 2025"

A fun project I worked on during the weekend .... I made a new pulsar map!

The one used in the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts uses slower and less stable pulsars.

This one uses millisecond pulsars!

Might make a few more changes to it. Also thanks to folks who gave feedback on v1.0.

#Pulsars

🔭📡

Thanks for tuning in!!

Astronomers uncover white dwarf system emitting bright radio pulses with strange rhythm | ASTRON Researchers identify a mystifying Long-Period Transient with 100% polarized radio emission, suggesting new type of cosmic radio source. A team of astronomers at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for…

An international research team led by @astrosanne.bsky.social at ASTRON, identify a mystifying Long-Period Transient with 100% polarized radio emission, suggesting new type of cosmic radio source: www.astron.nl/astronomers-...

Congrats to Natasha Van Bemmel on winning an MNRAS Student Prize. The MNRAS editors selected her first‑author paper, An Optically Led Search for Kilonovae to z~0.3 with KNTraP, as one of six best student‑led publications this year, what a debut!
#OzGrav #Swinburne #MNRAS #NatashaVanBemmel

It's a 'no' from me dawg

LIGO Detects Most Massive Black Hole Merger to Date - OzGrav Gravitational waves from record‑breaking black holes challenge current astrophysical models The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has observed the heaviest black‑hole merger ever detected,…

GW231123: Heaviest black‑hole merger yet detected in gravitational waves.
~100 M☉ + ~140 M☉ → ~225 M☉ remnant, spins near physical limit.
“This blip forces us to rethink how very heavy, rapidly spinning black holes come to be.” – Prof Eric Thrane
Read: www.ozgrav.org/news/ligo-de...

Comic. The Three Types of Unsolved Physics Problem (First panel) Vague. PERSON [next to curved diagram] What is the nature of time in quantum gravity? Is it a background parameter, a dynamic aspect of spacetime, or an emergent phenomenon? (Second panel) Precise. PERSON 2 with short hair [device with equation below: 71Ga + νe → 71Ge + e- .] Why does the *S.A.G.E.* Gallium Neutrino Capture Experiment produce only 75% as much germanium as predicted? (Third panel) Cursed. PERSON 3 with white hat [rectangular block with hairs growing out of it labeled Zinc Whiskers] Why does some metal randomly grow hairs? It keeps causing short circuits and we have no idea what’s going on. OFF-PANEL: Is this a joke? PERSON 3: No! Please help!

Unsolved Physics Problems

xkcd.com/3115/

The @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration is happy to announce the detection of the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves 🕳️🕳️

Amanda Farah at a podium in front of a slide introducing GW231123

In this morning’s plenary at #GR24Amaldi16, Amanda Farah introduces the newest (and most massive and likely most rapidly spinning) @ligo.org - @egovirgo.bsky.social - KAGRA event, #GW231123! Read more about this exceptional event in the discovery paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.08219

Great talk from Lia Medeiros on the event horizon telescope results! Black hole shadows were not something I had thought much about before, it kinda feels like the Universe is putting on a shadow puppet show 🕳️💫 @ioppublishing.bsky.social

Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes Ripples in space-time from collision recorded by gravitational wave detector forces a rethink of how the objects form

🔊 Two really massive black holes, COLLIDING💥!

LIGO has seen ~300 of these collisions since 2015, but this one is HUGE creating a black hole 256x the mass of the Sun. It's likely the merging black holes were themselves the by-product of previous mergers 🤓🔭🧪

ℹ️: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes Ripples in space-time from collision recorded by gravitational wave detector forces a rethink of how the objects form Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way. The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole about 10bn light years from Earth. Continue reading...

Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes

Water Balloons xkcd.com/3061

A black and white photo of Vera Rubin measuring spectra

Vera Rubin has been selected to be featured on the back of a quarter. She is the first astronomer to be honored this way. Read about her research on the Andromeda galaxy and how it led to the discovery of dark matter in this article written by Rubin herself. doi.org/10.1063/1.24...
🔭 #WomenInStem

I just updated my website. Check out the resources on there, including how to make nice FREE websites and how to make nice posters. rowina-n.github.io

Important education happening here #dachshund #ai

For a while I had a gig answering astronomy questions online.

When I got "what is that bright thing I saw in the sky?" questions, I'd guess "Venus" and then go look it up, putting their location, and the time, and direction of the observation into Stellarium. 98% of the time that guess was right.