In continued celebration of a decade of GW detections, some of the @vanderbilt.edu astrophysicists made this fun explainer video. We had a great time making this; just the right amount of cheesy delivery. My students have already gotten a kick out of it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkt...
Truly wonderful to have you and Barry visit us, Saavik! We all had a great time. Hope you did too!
Astronomers, do you know where Seyfert (of active galaxy fame) worked?
Vanderbilt, in Nashville.
Where he was also, apparently, a tv weather guy!
I know this thanks to a DELIGHTFUL visit to the Vandy Astro group!
Thanks to @stevertaylor.bsky.social & everyone else, from undergrads to faculty!
🔭
Stephen Taylor standing in a row of computer servers.
My research group (aka VIPER) visited our High Performance Computing facility @vanderbilt.edu. An incredibly impressive operation, and very exciting to see the investments in GPUs for AI and scientific computing. As for the picture below, I just wanted to look cool with some servers... 🚀🔭🧪⚛️💫🪐
Yeah, whenever I've tried using it for code, the results have been mixed. It's never perfect. But it's certainly getting better, and for small optimizations or fixes, it's like super specific stackoverflow thread. Provided it's used to assist or teach, it has utility. But not to replace.
Very honored to have been named a Chancellor Faculty Fellow by Vanderbilt University in recognition of my ongoing drive to push the boundaries of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astrophysics! (They used a photo of me from 2019 though...😆) 🧪🔭🚀🪐⚛️💫
news.vanderbilt.edu/2025/05/01/1...
And to be super clear, those pictures are NOT the LISA prototypes. Those are the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope being assembled!
A fun and productive LISA Science Team meeting at NASA Goddard! Our team is tasked with stewarding the mission toward maximizing its science outcomes. We’re really digging into our various tasks now; we even got to see prototypes of some of the laser and optics assembles. 🧪⚛️🔭
Strange enough, I did actually go up early! Vanderbilt has a default tenure clock of 7 years. Too long. I didn’t see the point of waiting around.
Two people enjoying a party to celebrate tenure.
Stephen Taylor cutting a cake to celebrate his academic tenure.
A cake to congratulate Stephen Taylor's award of tenure.
TENURE UNLOCKED 🎓🚀🧪⚛️🔭
I don't know why it makes me cringe so much when I hear a theorist refer to their research group as a lab. But it does. Where are your instruments, test tubes, and such?
🔬 New paper from my group in The Astrophysical Journal!
“Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary Population” by Nima Laal, introduces a normalizing flow emulator for the GW background signal from supermassive black hole binaries. A big step forward! @nanograv.bsky.social 🧪🔭⚛️🪐
A screenshot of a paper posted on Physical Review D.
Amazing work from Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow, Nima Laal. Wonderful to see this published. Answering "what if you searched for everything, everywhere, all at once" in pulsar-timing array gravitational wave searches. A gigantic Gibbs sampling hierarchical fit. 🔭🧪🪐
journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...
Rewatching the 1999 blockbuster The Mummy. I love this movie, it’s vibe, it’s soundtrack, everything. But when the mummy steals the eyes of the bespectacled grave plunderer, why does the mummy not subsequently need glasses?
Professor Sarah Vigeland of UWM gives an invited plenary in the Kavli Special Session at APS. Fantastic talk! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org
Xavi Siemens gets his APS Fellow on! Highly deserved and great to see! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org
My student Levi Schult absolutely smashed their talk today on comparing different detection techniques for the first single GW signal expected to be found by PTAs. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org
Dr Nima Laal, postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt in my group, tells us all about sampling data covariance matrices with Inverse Wishart distributions— everything everywhere all at once! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org
My student William Lamb @astrolamb.bsky.social updates us on some ambitious analytic calculations he’s been doing to model discrete binary and cosmic variance in the ensemble distribution of the stochastic GW background. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org
Great talk by my student Kyle Gersbach on directional power-based searches for supermassive binary black holes in PTA data! @dgrav.org
Learning about history of Loop Quantum Gravity. Awesome ideas. Terminology of the morning is Quantum Riemannian Geometry. Plus, curvature at Planck scale is 1e76 larger than at horizon of Solar Mass Black hole. Amazing. @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org
See you there, Carl!
✈️ Off to Anaheim for the APS 2025 Global Summit! Looking forward to some exciting talks, support my students and postdocs, cheering on NANOGrav folks, and delivering two talks on PTAs and LISA! 💫 @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org @nanograv.bsky.social @lisacommunity.bsky.social
This is good and beautiful. (Except for time flowing downwards from the top, which makes me dizzy.)
@royalsociety.org why are you still honouring Elon Musk with a Fellowship of your society?
He and his cronies are tearing down US science, blocked USAid that’ll result in the deaths of thousands from disease, and supports the Far Right. Why still honour him?? 🔭🧪⚛️
royalsociety.org/people/elon-...
This sounds like fun, Chris. What's the format? We started an Astronomy On Tap here in Nashville, but it sounds like you've managed to get professional comedians involved?
Congratulations to Priya on this amazing achievement!
@nanograv.bsky.social
Huge congratulations to Maura McLaughlin, Xavier Siemens, and all of NANOGrav on being awarded the 2025 Rossi Prize by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the @aasoffice.bsky.social!
It's wonderful that this field is being recognized. But there's much more to come from PTAs! 🔭 💫
Oh, I dabble in astronomy as a professor of it.