The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out.
We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal.
This is another extinction-level event for NASA science.
Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science
Very cool amateur imaging of Artemis II on its way to the moon by amateur astronomer (and Bad Astronomy Newsletter subscriber!) Ross Cunniff:
racunniff.blogspot.com/2026/04/arte...
I've now worked with a few retired people that came back to enroll in physics classes and do undergrad-Masters research credits at CSUF - one went on and is in his PhD at UC Irvine. There is a cost to enroll here but we rank high as a "best value" college!
White House Withholds Funding for NASA Science Missions Despite Recent Budget Bill gizmodo.com/white-house-...
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.
Hundreds of kids are still detained.
We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
I'm not sure! Is the mass-energy lost to GW + departing object going to be more than what comes in to induce the perturbation? I'd guess they balance perturbatively but it's tricky business to think about energy in GR when things get nonlinear.
I had *just* updated my ASTR 101 concept question that uses the most distant measured galaxy in its setup....
The mass left over from a NS merger will also be less than the sum of the initial components, but it's a messier estimate than in the BH case - GW and also mass ejecta, with details that depend on physics we don't know completely
GW are going to carry mass-energy away from somewhere, but if the objects are far apart and "post-Newtonian" it's coming from their orbital energy and the inspiral is energy balanced from that. The flyby would have to be very close to talk with the BH spacetime
I was looking at this! I think it might be a good option for inline checks. I'm also looking at text2qti for longer markdown question bank sharing; the format's not exactly the same but probably convertible.
Wishlist:
- version control friendly question writing (with images?)
- easy conversion and deployment into a public interactive page (markdown?) for sharing and testing
- later Canvas import
Next semester, I'll be redeveloping our general-ed Introduction to Astronomy to be asynchronous online. I'm looking to develop lots of little concept checks. But how to write and share them in a usefully shareable #openeducation way?
NY Times headline: "Happy Birthday, LIGO. Now Drop Dead. Ten years ago, astronomers made an epic discovery with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Cosmology hasn’t been the same since, and it might not stay that way much longer." Underneath, an artistic representation of two black holes orbiting each other.
The New York Times shares celebrations of our 10 year anniversary, and the challenges ahead, with memories of Rai Weiss and our clearest detection #GW250114
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/s... by Dennis Overbye
#GW10Years 🔭 🧪 ⚛️ ☄️
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
That came out lovely!
On Sunday April 6, at 1PM Eastern, I'll be giving a public talk via Zoom for the Advanced Studies Gateway at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
"Discovering the Universe of Gravitational Waves" will be a general audience talk. You can register at frib.msu.edu/gateway/even...
🎉 We have reached 200 #GravitationalWave candidates in O4! 🎉
The fourth observing run (O4) of our detector network has had the best performance so far, with more candidates than ever before! We are currently busy analysing all these wonderful data and look forward to sharing results
#O4IsHere 🔭☄️
You spelled awesome wrong
Looking forward to seeing all the wonderful science folks have been working on, and seeing so many friends across the scientific community.
And also proud to have contributed to the work that will be presented by Lami Shetu Suleiman at 4:33 in S11:
Semi-agnostic Equation of State models for Bayesian inference with Neutron Star observations
I'm proud to have contributed to the work that will be presented by Hsin-yu Chen at 1:45 in R11, on Inference of multi-channel r-process element enrichment in the Milky Way using neutron star merger observations
Poster 276: Jesus J Cortes Barron on using GW to estimate how neutron-star mergers contribute to r-process element
Poster 280: Nolan Davis on comparisons of waveform approximants for GW signals
We'll also be sharing posters in H00:
Poster 215: Lyla Traylor on building our prior distribution for the high-density neutron star equation of state
From my group:
- Emily Wuchner will be discussing measurements of neutron-star tidal parameters at Tuesday at 11:09 Session H20
- Ryan Johnson showing how he can correct for waveform uncertainty in compact binary inference on Tuesday at 2:54 in Session J17.
Back in Southern California for #APSSummit25! Here to support CSUF students and postdocs and other collaborators with some awesome presentations on gravitational-wave astrophysics.
If you have clear skies, Mercury is just 6° below and to the left of Venus (for northern hemisphereans). It was easy to spot with binoculars for me just now! They'll be close for a few more days, too.
I have a Pathfinder book you can borrow if you want to mix it up!
Saw Venus bright in the twilight tonight, with the thin arc of the crescent moon drifting through sunset-pink clouds below. ✨
I'm an astrophysicist working in gravitational-wave astronomy, contributing to the LIGO scientific collaboration and Cosmic Explorer.
HP 11C calculator (horizontal, silver and black, black keys with one yellow and one blue key), and a Casio fx7500g calculator (folding model, open to show screen and low pressure sensitive keyboards, with row of white buttons under screen).
HP 48g Calculator, tall profile, screen near top with row of white buttons under screen, calculator buttons below that. Overall light grey, with purple and teal highlights.
So @jocelynread.bsky.social posted her HS/UG calculator. My undergrad calcs were a folding Casio fx7500g and an HP11c. Still have both. Escalated to an HP48g (thru an HP48sx that died) and STILL use it every day. I won't say if I have several spares in case of failure... Show your #firstCalculator
