A picture taken in front of Peyton Hall at Princeton, with myself (Jiayi Sun) holding a trophy, Yilun Ma on the left, and Akash Gupta on the right.

A picture of a trophy, which is shaped like a ping pong paddle and with a ball attached to it. On the paddle front face it says "ASTRO PING PONG CHAMP 2025". A small tiger model is in front of the paddle-shaped trophy body, resembling Princeton's mascot.

It's quite an honor to be the 2025 champion of the Princeton Astro Ping Pong Tournament, 70 years after the commencement of this event!

My (semi-qualitative) argument is that, among all regular polygon that can tile a plane, hexagon is the closest to circle (so closest to the gaussian psf we use extensively).

But Adam's preference of hexagon certainly played a key role as well ;)

Have you seen this petition yet? Oppose the layoff of the NIST Atomic Spectroscopy Group

In case anyone has not seen this petition but wants to sign it in support of the NIST Atomic Spectroscopy Group: chng.it/VcGHJGt2y8

Radon xkcd.com/3037

World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US power company AES Corporation, submitted a project for a massive industrial complex for environmental impact assessment. This complex threatens the pristine skies above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the darkest and clearest of any astronomical observatory in the world [1]. The industrial megaproject is planned to be located just 5 to 11 kilometres from telescopes at Paranal, which would cause irreparable damage to astronomical observations, in particular due to light pollution emitted throughout the project’s operational life. Relocating the complex would save one of Earth's last truly pristine dark skies.

The skies above Paranal are at risk from a proposed industrial megaproject. 

This would be located in the vicinity of ESO's Observatory. If constructed, it would irreparably impact astronomical observations.

Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2501/
🔭 

📷 ESO/P. Horálek

The image shows a spiral galaxy, NGC 3351, captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy is seen edge-on, with its bright core and spiral arms clearly visible. The image also reveals intricate details of the galaxy's dust lanes and star-forming regions, highlighting the power of the Webb telescope's infrared vision to peer through cosmic dust and unveil hidden structures.

JWST observed NGC 3351 two days ago.
This one was processed by @yuvharpaz.bsky.social
nerdculture.de/@yuvharpaz/1...
🔭 🧪

A large galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The image is mostly black with a bright, glowing oval core at the center. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and light blue colored dust that emanates from the core’s center, but it is tightly contained to the core. There is black space between the core and glowing dust of the outer oval rings. The rings are wispy and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles. The dust in the outer rings contains dots that are navy blue, pinkish, reddish, and white. Throughout, there is also a smattering of background galaxies seen as small red and greenish dots.

#NASAWebb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument reveals that galaxy NGC 1433 contains dust and bubbles of gas throughout its spiral arms. Despite that, the galaxy has a low amount of dust and brightness, which hints at a recent collision with another galaxy: bit.ly/3ZXX4cN 🔭 🧪

I use ALMA and VLA a lot in my research and would love to be added to the list!

The work to defend the rights of women and immigrants and trans people, to preserve basic democratic and economic and international institutions, and to protect our planet - all just became immeasurably harder and more exhausting. Still very much worth it, though. Let's keep going.

Temperature Scales xkcd.com/3001

NHFP Application Feedback Information 2024 Thank you for your interest in this year's NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) Application Feedback Program! We will send you an email to ask for your application materials once we receive this form...

For anyone looking for astro postdoc positions this year: the NHFP application feedback program is back! We have a group of current/former postdoc fellows volunteering to provide unofficial feedback to your application material on a best-effort basis.

Applicant sign-up: forms.gle/SrfZVNjniZQP...

🔭

Check out those amazing MeerKAT HI data in @astrocosi.bsky.social's paper! We are really in a new era of high-resolution HI study

Types of Eclipse Photo xkcd.com/2917

Batavia NY, very cloudy...

Act Now | Save the Chandra X-ray Observatory Ask that Congress #SaveChandra! | The Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of NASA's last Great Observatories, has revolutionized our understanding of the Universe, mapped black holes across cosmic time, ...

“Save Chandra” website now up with explanation of the budgetary threat to this Great Observatory, some necessary corrections regarding current mission capabilities and operating costs, and - most important - ways that you can help. 🧪 🔭 🛰️ Spread widely!

We are live! 🔭
✨ PHANGS-JWST infrared imaging of 19 nearby galaxies
✨ ~100,000 PHANGS-HST star clusters and associations across 38 nearby galaxies
👉 data release archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/phangs
👉 press and image release webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

And we have a PHANGS-JWST press release this morning! The images are ABSOLUTELY worth checking out...

webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

Hidden Gems on a Ring: Infant Massive Clusters and Their Formation... We study young massive clusters (YMCs) in their embedded "infant" phase with $\sim$0.1" ALMA, HST, and JWST observations targeting the central starburst ring in NGC 3351, a nearby Milky Way analog...

Not sure why the original post has no webpage preview... But I have to say I'm quite proud of the paper title: "Hidden Gems on a Ring: Infant Massive Clusters and Their Formation Timeline Unveiled by ALMA, HST, and JWST in NGC 3351"

JWST/MIRI colored image of the nearby galaxy M95 (a.k.a. NGC3351)

ALMA CO 3-2 map of the M95 galaxy's central starburst ring

HST colored image the M95 galaxy's central starburst ring, with ALMA CO 3-2 map overplotted as contours

🔭 Paper day! If you'd like to know what matched-resolution ALMA+HST+JWST data can tell us about "infant" massive clusters and their birth timeline, check out my latest paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2401.14453

And now I've earned the right to officially claim M95 (NGC3351) as my favorite galaxy! 😁

Disorientation: A Science Poem by Katie Mack Astrophysicist Katie Mack encourages us to "see [our] world from four billion miles away" in this poem, presented in text and video formats.

“Disorientation” by @astrokatie.com makes me realise I should have more science poetry in my life. A compressed epic that flings you across the vast expanse of time and space. Pleased to see there’s an audio version read by Mack, as well as the written piece.

#Science #Poetry #Astronomy

Necessary conditions for the formation of filaments and star... Star formation takes place in filamentary molecular clouds which arise by physical processes that take place in the cold, neutral medium (CNM). We address the necessary conditions for this diffuse...

My first paper is out now on the arXiv (arxiv.org/abs/2401.01737) and through advance access on MNRAS (academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc... )
I investigate the conditions needed to form filaments in the cold neutral medium through a periodic turbulent box simulation.

The birthplaces of stars in the Whirlpool Galaxy For the first time, signatures of individual cold and dense star-forming clouds in a galaxy outside the Milky Way have been mapped over a wide area.

1/ Using IRAM's NOEMA interfrometer, MPIA's Sophia Stuber and Eva Schinnerer have mapped the stellar nurseries of cold, dense gas in the Whirlpool Galaxy. They found interesting differences in the chemical probes they used. 🔭
www.mpia.de/news/science...

OK this is the mind-blowing image of the week for me: the total global biomass of mammals.

Wild animals are a tiny proportion.

From a paper by Ron Milo Lab at Weizmann Institute, via a great Oxford lecture by @marionkoopmans.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🧪🔭 #MilkyWay23 Jiayi Sun starting to put MW in context

Situation not good:

spacenews.com/nasa-conside...

Agree with what you said! When people make sense of statements like this, they are implicitly comparing things to human scales. But realizing the use of such implicit assumptions is really important for achieving a more robust understanding, IMHO. The original post just didn't quite achieve that...

I just set up an automated way to send out invite codes to astro folk who request them 😁 I think I can send out about 100/day. 🔭

Donate any codes you have here: forms.gle/R35p4MRSwpk2...

& please share this code request form with other astro folks: forms.gle/GggKAPv8Vcrv...

And IC 342 in the same galaxy group!

apod.1875201235.bin

#apod 2023-10-07
The Once and Future Stars of Andromeda
Web page: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231007.html

Check out the Zotfile plug in -- it allows you to put the PDFs to wherever you want, so you can sync them with whatever cloud service you already have in place (like Dropbox)