Shishir Dholakia

rishabh pant almost falling over during a sweep shot

woke up early to watch something that'll cover the entire sky every three days

Come work with me at Macquarie University in Sydney!

Job ad is live on AAS: aas.org/jobregister/...

Jupiter rotation timelapse with lo (and shadow) transit! Taken Feb 8th from my backyard. Went out at 5 min intervals to capture a video. From each of these, the best 10% were stacked to produce a single frame (lucky imaging).

🔭C9.25, 📷 QHYII1585C

#jupiter #astrophotography #astronomy

Astronomers Discover Planet Identical To Earth With Orbital Space Mirror

Astronomers Discover Planet Identical To Earth With Orbital Space Mirror
theonion.com/astronomers-...

Come join the exoplanets team at UniSQ in Australia. Our team is seeking multiple PhD positions to understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems, involving ongoing programs on JWST, HST, and VLT. See AAS advert. Applications before March 07.

aas.org/jobregister/...

Wolf-Rayet Colliding Wind Binaries Wolf-Rayet stars embody the final stable phase of the most massive stars immediately before their evolution is terminated in a supernova explosion. They are responsible for some of the most extreme an...

Do you like binary stars? How about Wolf-Rayet stars? May I introduce you to my new chapter on what happens when you put WR stars in binaries... awesome colliding wind binaries!
This should be a handy resource whether you're new to or knee-deep in the field! 🔭(1/?)
arxiv.org/abs/2412.12534

looks like Berkeley just sent out a cancellation too!

Anyone on the East bay know if the tsunami warning is being cancelled or not?

Milky Way over Double Arch at Arches National Park

20s ISO3200 x18, foreground and background aligned +stacked separately and combined
🔭🌌

A photo of a reddish landscape with a starry sky and the Milky Way stretching vertically near the center of the sky. In the foreground are several pools of water reflecting the starry sky.

Just got back from a trip to Arches National Park. Got a lot of shots that I'm excited to process soon! 🌌🔭

Deeply sad to hear of Prof. Fajan's passing--a deeply inspiring and dedicated educator at Berkeley.

When I took his instrumentation class, COVID switched us to remote mid-semester. He ended up hand soldering Arduino kits and mailing them to us for the final project.

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) and the Moon rising over Brisbane. I took this timelapse on 30th September while it was still in the early morning sky, with @astroryan.bsky.social. Reposting on bluesky for all the new people here!

🔭🌌

That curve is caused by projection of the sky onto a flat sensor -- it can be created in a single shot by a fisheye lens. The wide-angle lens I used for this shot is rectilinear, so the Milky Way appears as a line.

Macquarie central square

Macquarie lawns and theatre

Applications are open til April 30 2025 for international applicants to do a Masters + PhD combo with me in astrostatistics at Macquarie University in Sydney!

www.mq.edu.au/research/phd...

Camera: Sony A7IV, lens: Sigma 14mm F1.4

I took this near Mount Kent observatory in Southeastern Queensland, Australia!

Finally got around to processing this short Milky Way timelapse I took a few months ago. I hope to take an extended version soon! 🔭🌌

Would love to be added -- thanks for putting this together!

Red planet at the right of the frame illuminated by a reddish host star, with a distant starfield in the background.

Hello new followers! I'm Shishir, and I study all things exoplanets. Below is an artist's rendition of Gliese 12 b, a planet I co-led the discovery of this year. I plan to post more cool things I come across in my research. I also love astrophotography, so stay tuned for pretty space pictures! 🪐🔭

skeleton reading a book with glowing red eyes and a sign that says "do not disturb. Bob is still trying to graduate."

I've watched the light fade from my officemate's eyes every day through postdoc application season this year

Reposting with 🪐🔭 because I always forget

Ooh cool! Let me look into this and I'll lyk what I find.

(6/6) In fact, four stars in the Kepler sample are likely members of the ~ 10 Gyr thick disk. We think these stars are blue stragglers. They were likely rejuvenated by mass transfer from their companion -- which is now a white dwarf. We plan to test this hypothesis soon!

A scatterplot with many purple points in two clusters. Histograms are shown along the axes to show how the scatterpoints are distributed.

A scatterplot with many purple points throughout the figure. Histograms are shown along the axes to show how the scatterpoints are distributed.

(5/6) If we take a look at the galactic kinematics of our sample and the earlier Kepler sample of pulsation timing binaries (Murphy+ 2018) we see suggestions that some stars are much older than the 2 Gyr lifetimes of δ Scuti stars. What's going on here?

A plot showing time delay (s) on the y axis and time on the x axis. A sine wave-like pattern is plotted.

A plot showing Declination and Right Ascension on the axes. A purple ellipse is plotted, with black data points lying along the ellipse.

(4/6) One highlight in our sample is the 3rd-mag α Pictoris! We present the first ever orbit for this system, incorporating Hipparcos astrometry in a novel joint fit. The α Pic system has an orbital period of 1316±2 days and α Pic B has a mass of 1.05±0.05 M☉.

A plot showing time delay (s) on the y axis and time on the x axis. A purple sine wave-like pattern is plotted.

A plot showing time delay (s) on the y axis and time on the x axis. A purple sine wave-like pattern is plotted.

A plot showing time delay (s) on the y axis and time on the x axis. A purple sine wave-like pattern is plotted.

A plot showing time delay (s) on the y axis and time on the x axis. A purple sine wave-like pattern is plotted.

(3/6) We apply this method to four years of TESS photometry of δ Scutis to find 53 new binaries! We get precise orbital parameters, incl. mass functions, orbital periods, eccentricities for 24 of these systems with a new jax-based forward model. Here are some cool examples ⬇️

(2/6) As this happens, the pulsations will arrive early or late. With the pulsation phase, we can then deduce the existence and the orbit of the companion! It's like getting radial velocities for free -- except this technique is actually is biased *towards* longer-periods.