Andrey Kravtsov

So how much of the £2356 you charge per paper goes to these "essential" peer reviewers?

This well-composed telescopic field of view covers over a Full Moon on the sky toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Of course the brighter stars show diffraction spikes, the commonly seen effect of internal supports in reflecting telescopes, and lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. The faint but pervasive clouds of interstellar dust ride above the galactic plane and dimly reflect the Milky Way's starlight. Known as galactic cirrus or integrated flux nebulae they are associated with the Milky Way's molecular clouds. In fact, the diffuse cloud cataloged as MBM 54, less than a thousand light-years distant, fills the scene. The galaxy seemingly tangled in the dusty cloud is the striking spiral galaxy NGC 7497. It's some 60 million light-years away, though. Seen almost edge-on near the center of the field, NGC 7497's own spiral arms and dust lanes echo the colors of stars and dust in our own Milky Way.

🔭 Galaxies, Stars, and Dust

Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Eder

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

Die Zauberflöte

A spiral galaxy viewed face-on, with its tightly packed golden arms and faint purple clouds spiraling around a hazy core.

a BEAUTIFUL image of spiral galaxy ngc 1068 that uses combined data from hubble, jwst, AND chandra telescopes!!!! 🌌

More seriously, this passage demonstrates just how deeply Newton was committed to the corpuscular view of things...

Seemed like a perfect description of setting up initial conditions for cosmological N-body simulations... 😆

I used this from the Opticks in my PhD thesis:
it seems probable to me that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles of such Sizes and Figures and with such other Properties and in such Proportion to Space as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them

Reading a section of Newton's "Opticks", I think he should have enlisted ChatGPT to help him with his spelling.

A starburst shines in infrared A starburst shines in infrared

esawebb.org/images/potm2...

I also think that most of the atoms in our bodies (definitely, oxygen, carbon, etc.) were inside stars in the past, and actually not one, but several different stars.

Here is a mid-infrared image of the same galaxy. The emission in this image is produced by the warm dust and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

🔭

A new fantastic image of M82 by JWST NIRCam, showing a biconical outflow of gas and dust from this starbursting galaxy.

🔭🧪

esawebb.org/images/potm2...

I have completed my contributions to this field thank you

Photo or a slide with numbers of staff, publications etc.

And here a lovely overview of #ArXiv statistics from Ralph Wijers.

#astrodon #OpenScience #eas2025

Want to instead explore the Virgo Cluster as captured by Rubin at full resolution? Head to our Skyviewer and enjoy some cosmic joyscrolling! There's so much to explore and discover ✨ #RubinFirstLook #CaptureTheCosmos 🔭🧪

➡️ skyviewer.app

In case you've been contemplating moving elsewhere in our Galaxy...

bsky.app/profile/phdc...

A three-panel image, two at the top, and one stretched across the bottom. At top left, two spiral galaxies are widely separated against the black background of space. At top right, two face-on spiral galaxies are close together. Their spiral arms appear stretched toward each other. At bottom, two spiral galaxies have collided, resulting in a broad X-shaped patch of milky white. Mottled clouds of dark brown dust are superimposed.

NEW: Astronomers used Hubble to re-examined the prediction that the Milky Way galaxy will eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy. They find there is only a fifty-fifty chance the two galaxies will smash together within the next 10 billion years: bit.ly/3YzymOx 🔭 🧪

Courtesy of @karpathy.bsky.social

The science paper publication industry gives millions in revenues to the publishers, but is created for free by the experts. The value-add of publication (what people pay for) is much less than that of peer-review and editorial (which they don't).

It is ripe for disruption. Hopefully like this.

A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at $z_{\rm{spec}}=14.44$ Confirmed with JWST JWST has revealed a stunning population of bright galaxies at surprisingly early epochs, $z>10$, where few such sources were expected. Here we present the most distant example of this class yet -- MoM...

This may not be obvious, but a paper like the Naidu et al on the new distance record holder galaxy
arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263
would normally be submitted to Nature. The fact that it was submitted to the @ojastro.bsky.social signals a major shift in the field.

🔭🧪

A galaxy at redshift z=14.44? This morning's arXiv mailing presented me with a distraction from examination marking in the form of a paper by Naidu et al. with this abstract: This paper has been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I usually feel a bit conflicted in situations when a paper has been submitted for editorial review. I am posting it here for two reasons: one is that I am not the Editor responsible for this paper; the other is that the…

A galaxy at redshift z=14.44?

This morning's arXiv mailing presented me with a distraction from examination marking in the form of a paper by Naidu et al. with this abstract: This paper has been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I usually feel a bit conflicted in situations when a…

not yet sure whether this is useful at all, but an interesting concept: each arXiv paper is a star and the nearest stars are papers on related topics:
soarxiv.org
It only has papers up to April 2025 rn (if you lose your cursor, hit Esc to recover it).

🔭

A google map with a path through the state of Illinois with 7 towns with the same names as major European cities (Paris, Vienna, Athens, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Geneva, IL).

If your next European adventure does not pan out, Illinois has alternatives to offer...

This is a general audience deep dive into the Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology that powers ChatGPT and related products. It is covers the full traini... Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

Andrej Karpathy: Deep Dive into LLMs Like ChatGPT [video] Discussion

Happy Sunday blue sky! 3 GitHub Repos to learn more about #AI and #ML

1. Neural Networks: Zero to Hero from Andrej Karpathy.
lnkd.in/erA-Gerp

2. Machine Learning Andrew Ng’s lectures
lnkd.in/ebtWemWD

3. Deep Learning Specialization - Andrew Ng’s lectures & practice problems
lnkd.in/e2RECCSQ

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

The authors of the quoted paper showed that if the transition to the true vacuum state occurs the Universe will collapse into black hole...

Frontiers | Cosmological Aspects of Higgs Vacuum Metastability The current central experimental values of the parameters of the Standard Model give rise to a striking conclusion: metastability of the electroweak vacuum i...

Experimental measurement of the Higgs boson mass indicates that it is likely to be in the metastable false vacuum.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/ast...

A quote from Coleman & De Luccia (1980) paper about how their result that the transition of the Higgs field to its true vacuum state will collapse will end all hope for our Universe.

A reminder from @astrokatie.com at the end of her "Picture an Astronomer" talk at UChicago tonight that no matter what you see in the news, things can get MUCH worse if the Higgs field tunnels to its true vacuum state... 🧪🔭