The Gould Belt does not exist!
In this groundbreaking study led by Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, researchers have leveraged a catalogue of massive OB stars and young star clusters to shows that this historical structure is not a physical structure but a 3D asterism.
#astronomy #galactic
Even if you're pro-AI, Anthropic themselves have said that using AI when learning means you don't develop skills
You need those skills later to debug the LLM's output or prompt it more effectively to fix something. These students are gonna struggle as soon as they have to do something harder.
I sure hope it’s Hannah Montana Linux
Cover of "Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics", which features an illustration of a 19-year-old Vera Rubin looking through a telescope over a backdrop of a first light image of spiral galaxies from the Rubin Observatory.
Happy International Women's Day!
Perfect time for me to (re)share our white paper on increasing the retention of women in professional astrophysics (really full of suggestions that broaden participation in academic science in general).
arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465
🧪🔭☄️👩🔬
Want to catch up on the latest news in star and planet formation?
The February issue of the Star Formation Newsletter is out! 🔭☄️
Highlight: The superclouds of the local Milky Way
by Lilly A. Kormann, João Alves, Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, Cameren Swiggum, Torsten A. Enßlin, Gordian Edenhofer 2026, A&A, 706, A161
www.aanda.org/2026-highlig...
To mark the February 11, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, some of the numerous skilled, committed and inspiring women working as scientists at the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy @univie.ac.at present themselves in a multifaceted photo collage.
The SFN is back! 🎉
"While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not 'happen in a vacuum'.
Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to good communication tools."
Paper day! ⤵️
I've had a fun couple of weeks working on resurrecting this newsletter with @joaoalves.bsky.social & @lillykormann.bsky.social!
I built a brand new website from scratch with JS+SvelteKit, which can link with forms & the arXiv API to look up papers and build a monthly newsletter automatically 👀
The Star Formation Newsletter is back! 🔭☄️ 🥳
From February onwards, we're returning with monthly round-ups of star and planet formation papers, interviews, and more!
Ever wondered how many bins to choose when making a histogram of data? The answer is that you shouldn't choose a number of bins yourself! ☄️ #astrocode
Here's a little notebook explaining how to make less biased histograms:
I'm glad people can benefit from the horrors you're fighting to get me out of
Their input source selection in the Sco-Cen region, showing stars with (blue) and without (orange) disks.
The fraction of young stars with disks as a function of age, based on three different selection methods. All show that many stars appear to have disks to ages well beyond ~10 million years, with a median lifetime of ~5 million years!
New paper led by Fabian Polnitzcky & with @sratzenboeck.bsky.social + @joaoalves.bsky.social: based on the ages of stars with infrared excess in Sco-Cen, it seems planet-forming disks last around twice as long as previous estimates suggest - giving twice as long for planets to form. 🔭☄️ #exoplanets
A new census of OB associations with Gaia!
In this study, we took advantage of my OB stars map to find new OB associations within 1 kpc. The goal was to create a useful reference catalogue for this era, and to trace the star formation and structure of the local Milky Way.
#stellarastro #galactic
On the arXiv today, the paper presents how we did 80,000 simulated cluster injection & retrievals to derive the first ever (!!!) full selection function for the open cluster census! 🔭☄️ #galactic
making applications full-screen makes them scary
If you have an idea to put on our creative wall, a puzzle, a thought, or just want to start a discussion: Grab a pen and bring that to the white board!✍️🖍️
P.S: There is no un-creative person, so that does not count as excuse😉
#stellarorigins2025
Next monday the Stellar Origins conference starts. Have an eye on our social events as well.
For young researchers in particular, there will be an event on tuesday evening. Check out our website for more information:
stellarorigins2025.univie.ac.at/social/
T-17! To make the wait go by a bit faster, check out the many interesting poster contributions. The best two posters at the conference will be awarded with a poster prize and an invitation to a contributed talk 🔭 #stellarorigins2025
stellarorigins2025.univie.ac.at/posters/
If we sweep the "unpleasant parts" of science history under the rug, then we're also doing a disservice to the many women who have lost chances at science careers because of past abuse, and we're neglecting a chance to learn something as a society about fixing it in the future.
a farmer tending to his field in the foreground with the text 'me checking the arxiv for new silly papers' with a dark cloud looming in the background with the text 'the world right now'
#🔭
is there a star cluster with an especially cool name to adopt?
one could argue choosing the colors is the horrors
being alive is great because there are so many colours you can try out in matplotlib. but then there is also the horrors
Offener Brief für Demokratie und für Freiheit der Forschung und Lehre!
science.orf.at/stories/3228...
the secret and ominous third option, I‘ll take it
what if they can sometimes open the safety cap and sometimes not? not speaking from personal experience of course
guessing the rats made the plot