@bobbenjamin.bsky.social
Wisconsin. All about the Milky Way.
🚀The Roman Cycle 1 Call for Proposals is OPEN!
Unlock new discoveries with the Wide Field Instrument—your science starts here! Apply for funding to analyze Roman data, perform theory/lab research, and propose new observations. 🔭☄️
📅 Deadline: Mar 17, 2026 (5 PM PDT)
📝 bit.ly/4q3jbbL
Remember that lovely aurora last week?
Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱
🧵
Three #NASAWebb discoveries in ONE! Webb shows there are FOUR dust shells (only one was previously seen), allowing researchers to narrow the stars’ orbit of one another to a LONG 190 years. Plus, they confirmed a third star is part of the “party”: https://bit.ly/4n1tpas 🔭 🧪
19.11.2025 16:02 — 👍 72 🔁 29 💬 0 📌 3I put forward a simple amendment to the government funding bill that would’ve extended health care tax breaks to give folks some breathing room.
Every. Single. Republican. Voted NO.
This fight isn’t over.
Pre-ACA, I was a postdoc on an NSF fellowship at a university that didn't offer employment benefits to independent fellows. At that time, being a woman meant that my premiums were double that of my male counterparts. The extra cost came out of my grant's budget for benefits, equipment, and travel.
10.11.2025 14:30 — 👍 104 🔁 36 💬 1 📌 2
The @herts.ac.uk astronomy MSc and PhD applications are open.
I'm offering PhD projects on JWST spectroscopy of young stars in Tr 14 and star-cluster formation.
I'm also offering an MSc project on variability of YSOs.
www.herts.ac.uk/research/cen...
#galactic #stellarastro #astro #Physics
Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have created one of the largest low-frequency radio colour images of the Milky Way ever assembled. This spectacular new image captures the Southern Hemisphere view of the Galactic Plane – the disk of our Galaxy, which appears to human eyes as the glowing band of the Milky Way – now revealed across a wide range of radio wavelengths, or ‘colours’ of radio light.
This is what the band of the Milky Way would look like at night if your eyes could see radio waves. A hidden beauty.
It's a new image created by the Murchison Widefield Array, which scanned the sky in 20 radio "colors" over frequencies from 72 to 231 megahertz. 🧪🔭
www.icrar.org/gleam-x-gala...
Hey, astronomers. Can you imagine astronomy research without ADS?!?!? No? So, have you filled out the ADS survey yet?
Help archives help you!
(Help archives keep funding!)
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Textbook cover for The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Theory and Practice by Jason T. Wright published by an American Astronomical Society and IOP Publishing Partnership (ebooks)
I wrote a textbook!
I hope you like it.
store.ioppublishing.org/page/detail/...
😠
03.11.2025 22:41 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Awesome! Congratulations!!!
27.10.2025 21:24 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I've made my new Star Central VR world public for anyone who would like a peek.
horizon.meta.com/world/775774...
If you're interesting in observations of stellar populations/nearby galaxies, Dan Weisz's group is hiring two postdocs! Come work with me and live in paradise in California 🌞
aas.org/jobregister/...
Oct 18, 2025 Madison, WI. No kings protest
18.10.2025 19:43 — 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This image captures a richly detailed section of the Milky Way, showcasing a tapestry of stars and glowing nebulas. Against a deep black cosmic backdrop, countless white stars sparkle like scattered diamonds. Wisps of reddish-pink nebulas drift across the scene, forming delicate tendrils and cloud-like structures.
👶🌟 ICYMI, Gaia released the most accurate 3D map of stellar nurseries in the Milky Way.
The map extends 4000 light-years from us, with the Sun at the centre.
Explore it here 👉 https://f.mtr.cool/lkkmqlzqih 🔭
🤩
20.09.2025 03:29 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0🐦 Fly through a 3D map of stellar nurseries ✨
Scientists have created the most accurate 3D map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from #ESAGaia.
The map extends to a distance of 4000 light-years from us, with the Sun at the centre 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪
My favorite parts of this movie are flying by the California Nebula and then speeding by W40. These HII regions are starting to feel like old friends.
17.09.2025 03:20 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP) is celebrating 20 years of high school teachers & students doing astronomy research at IPAC!
“NITARP changed my life,” said one teacher who participated in the program.
Read more great quotes here:
www.ipac.caltech.edu/news/20-year...
Hello everyone! We have joined BlueSky!!
21.08.2025 16:58 — 👍 27 🔁 12 💬 3 📌 1
Picture of wood beams crisscrossing the underside of the roof in a conference room. The photo is at a jaunty angle, catching the edge of a tall slide, and the ceiling below the beams where the projector is mounted. A white circle is drawn to indicate the presence of a fluffy gray tail among the beams.
Lesser galago, a small gray fluffy primate with large eyes and large ears, lies on a round wooden beam, looking down to the room below.
Lesser galago, a small gray fluffy primate with large eyes and large ears, lies on a round wooden beam, looking across the roof at one of its buddies. The fluffy grey tail has a black tip. His chin and nose are a light pink.
Currently attending a ~35 person workshop on HI in galaxies, at a venue just outside Kruger Nat’l Park. Today we had four special attendees in the rafters: lesser galagos, or lesser bushbabies!
19.08.2025 18:19 — 👍 16 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 1
I don't post a lot, but I am particularly proud of this paper. It's the first observational sample of binary companions to stripped envelope supernovae. And places constraints on the binary evolution physics.
It only took me 10 years to build with HST!
arxiv.org/abs/2508.12677
Grid of galaxies, sorted by size and color, overlaid with colored boxes showing the Milky Way getting smaller and bluer back in time
🌌 What does our Milky Way look like from the outside? 🌀 How has that changed over time? ✨ Why did my coauthors let me use the phrase “child movie star” in an actual paper? ⚡️
Check out arxiv.org/abs/2507.17637, and the incredible work by Imig et al in arxiv.org/abs/2507.17629 to find out!
A Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (i.e. relationship between colour and brightness of stars) for ~1200 open clusters. Gaia magnitudes have been dereddened. The points show member stars in the clusters, colour-coded by age. The outlined regions show areas with variability based on Gaia DR3, labelled by Gaia class name.
What happens if you combine @esa.int's Gaia satellite's variable star classifications with open clusters? 🔭☄️🧪 #stellarastro
In paper #2 out today, Richard Anderson & I collaborated on doing just that and seeing what we could learn! There are tons of pretty plots and insights, so let's dive in ⤵️
Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules
Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules theonion.com/supreme...
10.08.2025 15:00 — 👍 3044 🔁 254 💬 57 📌 19😬😬😬
22.07.2025 14:15 — 👍 14 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
🐾 An image of the Cat's Paw Nebula by #NASAWebb in near-infrared light was released this month.
This visualization explores a subset of toe bean-reminiscent structures within a section of the nebula, a massive, local star-forming region located approximately 4,000 light-years away. 🔭 🧪
Oops, JHU, not STScI… sorry!
18.07.2025 18:10 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Always fun to look at accepted HST programs. Hats off to David Thilker (STScI) with a title that doubles as a cry for help: “Our grasp of star formation, feedback, and galaxy evolution is incomplete without a JWST+HST look at the HI-dominated, outer disk of a spiral galaxy”
Hear, hear! Good luck!
