Dr./Prof. Cara Battersby

Last week, NASA and NSF released their FY26 budget requests. We list the detailed impacts on the astronomical sciences in this blog post, and share how you can take action today.
aas.org/posts/news/2...

@policy.aas.org

The Presidents Budget Request for NASA is out. It’s a bloodbath

Canceled are DAVINCI, VERITAS, Juno, OSIRIS-APEX, US participation in ExoMars and EnVision…

Huge cut to R&A. No funding to begin development of the Uranus Orbiter.

If you’ve ever cared about NASA, time to contact congress.

Team | Professor Cara Battersby The Milky Way Laboratory Research Team Meet the people who make the science happen! Faculty: Dr. Cara Battersby is the PI and founder of the Milky Way Labor ...

Nervousness aside, I hope I did justice to the amazing science being done by the folks at the Milky Way Laboratory (battersby.physics.uconn.edu/our-team/). I'll share the video when it's published and in the meantime, check out and consider supporting Universe Today (www.patreon.com/cw/universet...)

3) After the fact, I kept thinking of how I could have said something better, an analogy I could have brought up, someone's work I should have mentioned, etc. But I'm pretty sure if you wait to put yourself out there til you are perfect... it won't happen. So, deep breath, leap of faith, go!

2) I was SO much more nervous than I expected. I'm used to talking to auditoriums full of people about astronomy, but I was definitely feeling intimidated and majorly starstruck. Feeling in awe of the folks who do this on the reg. how. do. you. do. it??

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1) Fraser Cain and the team at www.universetoday.com are *awesome*. I've been a fan for a long time, but the work they are doing is more important than ever. High quality, engaging astronomy journalism - now with no ads 🤯. If you're not a fan already GET. ON. THAT. TRAIN.

Fraser Cain Your ultimate guide to all things space with Fraser Cain, Publisher of Universe Today and co-host of Astronomy Cast. Here you can find: 🚀 Space Bites – all the most important space news stories rele...

Whew guys, I had a big, fancy, grown-up interview with THE @fcain.universetoday.com today! 🤯😮🤩 You'll be able to check out the interview (mostly me gushing about our fabulous Galactic Center maybe?) on his youtube channel (www.youtube.com/@frasercain) soon.

A few take-aways:

The highly filamentary nature of dust and gas in the interstellar medium is a huge topic of discussion and debate, so good observation! Depending on the scale and environment it could be from gravitational flows, turbulence, magnetic fields, some combination or something else entirely!

Perspective! The Sun (and therefore the Earth and all of us!) are deep in the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy, so we see it "edge-on" when we look out. To get a "top-down" perspective you'd need to send a spacecraft several thousand light years above the plane - not practical now or probably ever!

Not a dumb question at all! Being in the middle of all the gas and dust of the Milky Way is a big challenge! Most surveys of galaxies just look ABOVE the Galactic plane to avoid it. But I want to understand all the gas and dust of the Galaxy, so I stare straight at it 😜

Lol, I've already decided we just have to embrace the typos, otherwise, it will drive us crazy 😆

Yay, thank you @sarahkendrew.bsky.social ❤️🎉

to be fair, i literally joined yesterday, but your support is so greatly appreciated 🙏❤️

Love it!!! There is SO SO much more to be seen in the Galactic Center, as perfectly evidenced by the combination with that phenomenal MeerKAT data 😍🤩

haha, yes true! But that's historically been the "universe" that we could access at high spatial resolution. That's changing with new facilities though!

Home | Professor Cara Battersby Contact InformationEmail: cara.battersby@uconn.edu Office: Gant South S-113F Virtual Office: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/meet/cab16109 Phone: (860 ) 486-398 ...

I do astrophysics research with an awesome group of students at the Milky Way Lab (battersby.physics.uconn.edu) at UConn and would love to be able to share our most exciting results!

Thank you! And yes - how big the universe and its largest structures are is absolutely mind-blowing!

yes

Yes exactly! What I wouldn't give for the top-down view... 😮🤩

Great thanks! @bot.astronomy.blue
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By combining with other datasets and cutting edge simulations (see our 3-D CMZ page! centralmolecularzone.github.io/3D_CMZ/) we are creating a top-down model of our Galaxy's center, allowing us to trace gas flows from the disk of the Galaxy, all the way to its center.

By systematically studying light from the entire inner Milky Way, we showed (in Battersby et al. 2025a: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025ApJ....) that the CMZ is separate and unique in our Galaxy and may be bigger than previously thought.

This image shows three far-infrared wavelengths from the Herschel space observatory (350, 160, and 70 micron) towards the inner 7 degrees of our Galaxy. The "figure 8" shape near the very center is our Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), the site of the most extreme star formation in the Galaxy.

For my first bluesky post (🥳🎉), I'll describe my cover image. Our Galactic Center stands alone and strange. Largely separated from the rest of the Galaxy, it responsible for controlling how much gas eventually flows towards the central supermassive black hole.