Bob Benjamin

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  🔭

🤩

🐦 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.

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!!

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!

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...

😬😬😬

YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute Cat's Paw Nebula - James Webb Space Telescope #shorts

🐾 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!

Always 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!

The hardest disbelief to suspend about the show.

data: CL-WESTERLUND-2-NIRCAM, released 2025-07-14, processed: C.Blanchard

🔭 Program 3523-Evolution of protoplanetary disks and early stellar evolution in starburst: A NIRCam and MIRI observation of the young starburst cluster Westerlund 2: www.stsci.edu/jwst-program...

Data:CL-WESTERLUND-2-NIRCAM, released:2025-07-14

NASA, ESA, CSA, STSci/ #JWST NIRCam 410, 335, 150-162

🔭🧪 SPHEREx data are at IRSA! irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/Missions/sph...

Getting an account on the RSP Before getting started: Understand whether you have Rubin data rights.- Rubin data rights are required in order to hold an account in the Rubin Science Platform., All scientists and students affili...

🔭 Friendly advice for astronomers in the US and Chile--if you are excited to access @vrubinobs.bsky.social Data Preview 1 on Monday, request your account *now*--it has to get approved by a human. For best results use your university single-sign on, if available.

rsp.lsst.io/guides/getti...

Here's a little side-by-side of a patch of our Virgo imaging (from Mihos+17) compared to today's Rubin release. I knew that Rubin field looked familiar! Nice to see they recover a lot of that low surface brightness structure. 🔭

Statistical Machine Learning for Astronomy -- A Textbook This textbook provides a systematic treatment of statistical machine learning for astronomical research through the lens of Bayesian inference, developing a unified framework that reveals connections ...

An absolutely fantastic textbook on statistics and machine learning by Prof. Yuan-Sen Ting came out this week - and it's free! #astromethods ☄️

I had a read and it's incredibly comprehensive and well-written - I expect this to become *the* foundation book on stats & ML basics in astro.

This is an early computer rendering of how the Earth's gravity would distort light from distant stars if our planet had the density of a neutron star. The resolution of the image is very low -- maybe 256x256 -- and the color palette is limited. The Earth is in the center of the image, oriented so that North and South America are visible to the viewer. Parts of Europe and Africa are also visible because of the distortion of light rays by the the Neutron-Earth's gravity. Images of stars cluster near the Earth, and the shapes of nearby spherical objects are slightly distorted.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website posted its first picture OTD in 1995. It was a computer-generated image showing how Earth would bend starlight if it had the density of a neutron star.

APOD is *thirty years old* today! 🧪 🔭

apod.nasa.gov/rjn/apod/ap9...
Image: Robert Nemiroff

The core portion of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has successfully completed vibration testing, ensuring it will withstand the extreme shaking experienced during launch: go.nasa.gov/4jNWjcK 🔭 🧪

Dara Norman @aas.org President kicks off the meeting with inspiration. “We are all in this together”. #aas246
🧪🔭✨

Next to Trump and Musk, Shatner and I look like adoring newlyweds.

The new galactic space port should be opening tomorrow.

Explore the port and then take a starship and visit a dozen locations within 1250 parsecs (4000 light-years).

🚀 The Roman Science Support Center (SSC) at IPAC has a new, redesigned website: roman.ipac.caltech.edu

Explore resources to prep for Roman science — including:
🧪 Simulated data and detailed instrument specs
🔭 Virtual Lecture Series
📝 Guidance for the first Call for Proposals

The central portion of a lenticular galaxy. The center holds a bright-white core that illuminates most of the image. The brightness decreases with distance from the center. Water-like waves of dark brown dust surround the center with long clouds of brown dust slightly above. Faint red stars are spread throughout.

Although NGC 4753, seen in this edge-on Hubble observation, appears to be exceptional, astronomers theorize that if one were to look at it from above it would look like a normal spiral galaxy: bit.ly/3G2bTmJ 🔭 🧪

Frank Kameny the astronomer The famed gay rights leader and accomplished scientist was one of thousands of US government employees who lost their livelihoods during the Lavender Scare.

Astronomer and gay rights leader Frank Kameny was born 100 years ago today. His fight for justice helped foster change in and beyond STEM. doi.org/10.1063/pt.s...
#HistSci #Physics #Astronomy

I realize now that I’ve wanted to see this my entire career.