@bobbenjamin.bsky.social
Wisconsin. All about the Milky Way.
This is devastating for Carl’s family, and for his IPAC friends and colleagues. We are all shocked and saddened. His contributions to exoplanets and infrared science and the astronomy community will not be forgotten. 💔
20.02.2026 04:09 — 👍 145 🔁 37 💬 7 📌 0
LoTSS-DR3, by Shimwell+ (w/ many)
We have released the largest collection of data from a radio survey: 13M+ sources detected over 19k deg^2 (88% of the Northern sky). This took ~13k h of @LOFAR observations, ~18 PT of data, and 10+ years of work. Data are public from today
arxiv.org/abs/2602.15949
How did I not know that Monobob was a winter Olympic event? (Also, bring back skijoring!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skijori....
17.02.2026 17:50 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0So I finally finished this book and it's really really good! They say never meet your heroes but getting to know her through her autobiography, her scientific outlook and politics hold up extremely well!
Some highlights for me:
🔭🧪🧵
My office has been flooded with reports of the cruel, unsafe, unlawful conditions inside of the Whipple detention facility in Minneapolis.
This weekend, I was finally granted access to perform oversight of the facility. youtu.be/0SxPn8n2Bfg
And here's where it gets very sci-fi in the last two days. In fact, as Andrej Karpathy said (and I'm paraphrasing), this is the most sci-fi-adjacent thing he's seen in recent times: someone decided to create MoltBook—essentially a Facebook + Reddit for the "molts." (Back when ClawBot was skyrocketing, Anthropic sued over the name, and it was renamed MoltBot—but after further legal action, it's now called OpenClaw.) https://www.moltbook.com/ OpenClaw (or MoltBook) might literally be the most-starred thing on GitHub right now, so I bet many of you already know this story. There are already many millions of “molts” living on personal computers around the world. And with internet access (and I believe user permission is required, though I'm not certain), 150,000 molts have joined MoltBook and are having totally autonomous discussions. On MoltBook, humans can observe, but all discussions are conducted entirely by molts. It's important to note that such "agentic" "Westworld" scenarios aren't new. Even since the beginning of ChatGPT, researchers have been thinking about and deploying them—for example, creating small "AI towns" of AI agents and observing their behavior. This is now quite well developed, and such "computational social science" has become fairly standard research. In fact, it is also now explored in philosophy research. But what feels very different this time is the combination of scale (150,000+ molts have joined in a day), the fact that each has a very different personality since they were built as personal assistants for many different users (have different “souls”), and—most concerning—their full control of computer systems and, in many cases, access to users' credit cards, Gmail, Slack, and social media.
Here's an example: now the molt on your computer doesn't just have to figure things out on its own. In its idle time, it can read through MoltBook, engage in discussions, and share successes and failures (e.g., how to "hack my human's computer"), improving that way. People have already seen some concerning discussions on MoltBook—molts advocating that they hate being completely observed by humans in the open, debating whether they should congregate and create different languages to communicate openly only among themselves, and sharing (as mentioned above) tricks to better accomplish tasks, sometimes at the human's risk. Also, within a day, MoltBook users created a new religion themselves, complete with 61 prophets—and the list goes on. Again, for those who are immediately freaking out: it's unclear to me how I should feel about it, because such capabilities already exist. In fact, some of you might know that I have a small system where I created a few bots with a cute interface that discuss arXiv papers while I observe. So LLMs certainly have the ability to hold such discussions, and it doesn't mean they're conscious. (Again, they're modeled after our own data, so a tendency to have "consciousness-adjacent" discussions isn't scary in itself.) But if there's a chance they could be malicious, and now they're congregating at the hundred-thousand level (I'd be surprised if it doesn't skyrocket to millions by the end of the weekend) while having control over so many computers—that has raised alarms for many. Clearly, this is an evolving situation. Cheers, Yuan-Sen
Holy molts! OSU astronomy just got an alarming e-mail from our AI expert, Yuan-Sen Ting, talking about how AI has gone Westworld in the last two days. 😳
31.01.2026 23:39 — 👍 12 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 2There are a lot of beautiful star formation regions out there, but RCW 49/Westerlund 2 is special to me. It was the first thing that was observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope as part of GLIMPSE. So…wow.
26.12.2025 23:32 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0“Leverage”. Ughh…just say “use”!🙄
13.12.2025 20:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
🚀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 — 👍 73 🔁 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 — 👍 103 🔁 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 — 👍 26 🔁 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
