Hannah Earnshaw

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

🧪🔭☄️👩‍🔬

It turns out the U.S. did a “double tap” attack just as emergency responders were arriving at the girls’ elementary school. This is what the Russians do routinely in Ukraine.

That’s a war crime under international humanitarian law.

Why do we do astrophysics? At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...

"Every person is a human being, whose personal development is more important than our short-term scientific accomplishments" - and more bangers in this from David Hogg (spoiler: it's about AI!) arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181 🔭

"This process is also open to those outside the United States who may be impacted by a proposed system."

Thank you @aas.org!

It's *important* that global communities are able to have a say in a global commons - the sky we all share.

USA FCC granting spectrum allowance for 1M impacts us all.

🔭

Fun to be seeing the word UVEX a lot in the Winter Olympics coverage, even if it's a company that makes helmets and goggles rather than our space telescope in development 😂

The cube is a tough cookie!

Ugh! Didn't even get out to check. Some people. How bad was the damage?

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

BREAKING: The Senate just blocked a bill that would have renewed ICE's budget without real, enforceable changes.

This is a direct result of hundreds of thousands of people across the nation demanding that our Senators vote no.

It’s -9 degrees. Downtown Minneapolis is packed for the anti-ICE rally and the crowd keeps growing

New article on the NuSTAR site about the mysterious GRB 250702B event, and how NuSTAR and other high-energy telescopes helped to shed (X-ray) light on the possible source.

An artist's impression of one possible explanation for the ultra-long gamma-ray burst GRB 250702B, showing the moment of explosion as a stellar-mass black hole merges with the massive star it is tearing apart and blasts a powerful jet into space. Clouds of dust created from the torn-apart star surround a burgeoning explosion which shoots a bright jet into space. Image credit: NASA/LSU/Brian Monroe.

Most gamma-ray bursts last seconds to minutes and are associated with the explosive death of a massive star. However, GRB 250702B in July 2025 lasted hours to days, causing astronomers to wonder what could produce an explosion that just wouldn’t stop. 🔭🧪🛰️ nustar.caltech.edu/news/nustar2...

Ad Astra managed to make Moon Pirates boring. MOON PIRATES. I will never forgive it for the two hours of my life it wasted.

Congress must immediately act to impeach & imprison Donald Trump.

And if they fail to do so, the rest of the world should punish the USA just as heavily as was done to Russia for attacking Ukraine.

We should not get to kidnap heads of state & "run" sovereign countries like vassals.

Wake Up Dead Man was definitely the film I needed to see right now. Excellent stuff, and worth going to the movies for!

Ola Gjeilo, The Choir of Royal Holloway, 12 ensemble - The Rose YouTube video by OlaGjeiloVEVO

My favourite of the songs we've been singing in choir this season - The Rose by Ola Gjeilo youtu.be/Ph44oJ7WpGU?...

By Libby Kercher

Image of comet 3I/ATLAS posted on facebook by Gerald Rhemann Text: Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas 02 12 2025 UT 01h39m Location: Farm Tivoli, Namibia Telescope: ASA Astrograph 12" f3.6 Camera: ZWO ASI 6200 MM Pro Exp. Time: LRGB 20/6/6/6 min. North is up FOV: 75x110´ Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger

Here is a stunning image of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, taken on Dec. 2 by astrophotographers Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger, showing the comet's long wispy plasma tail in full glory and a dusty anti-tail.

www.facebook.com/groups/22700...
#Astronomy
1/n

This is extremely bad and worrisome for obvious reasons, but it's worth pointing out that this was obviously the student's goal

She knowingly wrote a garbage essay for her trans prof's class and when she obviously got a terrible grade stirred up a media storm

This was clearly the intended outcome

It's Friday, and apparently bluesky is ready for this fun revelation:

Dinosaurs lived on the other side the Galaxy.

Webb First to Show 4 Dust Shells 'Spiraling' Apep, Limits Long Orbit - NASA Science NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first of its kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry.
1/? ⚛️🔭🧪
science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

You're not on the trail - the trail is on you

Graduate Center Astrophysicists Find Black Hole Flare Is Biggest and Most Distant Seen The flare, co-discovered by scientists at CUNY and Caltech, may be the result of a mega black-hole meal.

What happens when a supermassive black hole takes a bite of a giant star?

It glows brighter than 10 trillion suns.

Profs. @saavikford.bsky.social and @bmckastro.bsky.social helped uncover this mind-bending feast in Nature Astronomy

It's Beetlejuice!!

(Uh oh. Someone just showed up. Gotta go! Happy Halloween!)

If we look at a nearby star-forming galaxy, that's like having thousands of Betelgeuse signals, all added together, allowing us to put even stronger limits on axion properties. If axions really are dark matter, we are slowly but surely closing in on their nature!

Betelgeuse is much bigger and hotter than the Sun, so searching for axion X-ray signals there allows us to put stronger constraints on the possible properties of axions, since we don't detect them from there either. But can we do a bigger experiment than that?

The production and decay of axions would produce a faint excess X-ray signal from the Sun, so observing the Sun allows us to put limits on how large and interactive an axion must be, if it exists. But in order to improve those limits, we need to find a bigger star. Like, say, Betelgeuse!

The centers of stars like our Sun are extremely hot environments which may produce axions, a hypothesized tiny, unimaginably light particle that is a candidate for dark matter AND might solve the matter/anti-matter asymmetry problem in particle physics, so there's lots of interest in finding them!

Composite image of the Sun including high-energy X-ray data from NuSTAR (blue); low-energy X-ray data from Hinode (green); and ultraviolet data from Solar Dynamics Observatory (red). The centers of stars like or even bigger than our Sun are unimaginably hot environments that may hold the key to detecting dark matter.

Particle Physics in Space: In Search of the Elusive Axion! New article up on the NuSTAR website about how we can use our astrophysics mission to do particle physics too, and hunt for dark matter! 🔭🧪
nustar.caltech.edu/news/nustar2...

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset.
In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia.
In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)