Francesca Fragkoudi

Cake to the rescue: how these PhD students are cooking up a sense of community One treat at a time, these graduate students are helping to raise funds for charitable organizations.

Cakes for Good: an initiative by Durham astronomy's wonderful PhD students reported on in Nature 🤩
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Left, our best surface brightness model of the 1.7-GHz global VLBI observation used here, which has been reconvolved with the main lobe of the interferometer’s point spread function and added to the residuals (34 μJy per beam r.m.s.). For reference, red contours show the surface brightness at 2.1 μm observed by the W. M. Keck Observatory adaptive optics system30. The positions of two low-mass perturbers are each marked with a black X. The 2 × 108 M⊙ object first detected by ref. 24 is labelled , and the 1.13 × 106 M⊙ detection reported here is labelled . The zoomed-in region shown in the right-hand two panels is indicated by the black square, which has a side length of 60 mas. Top right, detail of the bright arc around , with the colour scale modified to emphasize the gap in the arc produced by the gravitational perturbation of . Bottom right, GI corrections to the lensing convergence (expressed in units of lens-plane surface mass density), showing a compact, positive feature whose position and mass are consistent with the independent parametric modelling results for . The dashed black circle has a radius of 80 pc and the lensed emission is indicated by the black contours.

Astronomers have detected a dark blob of...something, billions of light years away. It's as massive as a million Suns & it emits no detectable radiation.

It might be a clump of dark matter, revealing new details about the structure of the invisible universe. 🧪🔭

www.ucdavis.edu/news/astrono...

The radial acceleration relation at the EDGE of galaxy formation: testing its universality in low-mass dwarf galaxies A tight correlation between the baryonic and observed acceleration of galaxies has been reported over a wide range of mass ($10^8 < M_{\rm bar}/{\rm M}_\odot < 10^{11}$) - the Radial Acceleration Rela...

Paper day! My PhD student Mariana Júlio, with @readdark.bsky.social, @pengfeili.bsky.social and others, studies the internal dynamics of dwarf galaxies and finds they don't agree with the Radial Acceleration Relation, challenging the dark matter alternative MOND.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.06905

🔭☄️🧪
1/7

interesting results! 🤩

🌌 Yesterday, the Durham Advanced School on Astrophysical Simulations kicked off at Durham University! PhD students and researchers are diving into both theoretical and practical aspects of astrophysical simulations. Big thanks to the Institute of Computational Simulations for organizing! 🙏

The wait is over! Next week the Durham Advanced School on Astrophysical Simulations kicks off at @durhamuniversity.bsky.social We’re finalizing preparations for this international event with 50 students and ~12 lecturers 👩‍💻👨‍🏫 Big thanks to the DU-ICC for hosting!
📸 More updates and photos coming soon!

As a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW) I support our statement on the war in Gaza.

www.knaw.nl/en/news/stat...

Announcement card vor the astroEDU summer 2025 activities collection with three images showing electonics, a tactile Jupiter and a person rubbing a styrofoam container

From using Arduino to simulate exoplanet transits (perfect for older students fond of technology) to exploring lightning on other planets, and wrapping up with a tactile Jupiter experience designed for younger children: This is the astroEDU summer collection of activities 2025! 1/4 🔭 #astroedu

A Stellar Revolution: How Open-Source Tool MESA Changed the Way We Study Stars A Stellar Revolution: How Open-Source Tool MESA Changed the Way We Study Stars on Simons Foundation

Great article about the importance of software engineering and open source code in astrophysics 🔭🧪 (and if anyone is keen to work with me on #BlackHoles lmk, I am planning to hire a software engineer soon!) 😊

www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/12/a...

Last month we had the privilege of having Durham U's Chancellor, Dr Fiona Hill, record the narration for a new VR movie we're developing about the life of our Milky Way, using the new Auriga Superstars simulations 🔭☄️✨
We're really excited to share this soon with you all 👀
#astronomy #astrosci

Astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge FRS was born #OnThisDay in 1919. During her long career she helped originate the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, discovered the most distant astronomical object known at the time, and helped develop instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope.

#WomenInSTEM #Space

oh dear, scary, but good to know since I often use google for quick calculations and unit conversions 😱

Zooniverse The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.

We’ve got a new zooniverse program called Dwarf Quest! Help us find members of our Milky Way’s galactic entourage in data from the Dark Energy Camera
www.zooniverse.org/projects/ywy...

Letter from SpaceX that is complaining to FCC about AST.

So something @stilgherrian.com shared earlier caught my eye and I did some reading.

Apparently, SpaceX is lodged a complaint with the FCC that another company, AST, is putting to many satellites into orbit.

First and foremost, let's get this out of the way ... fuckin lolz. They have no shame.

1/n

Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows First major attempt to chart researchers’ views finds interpretations in conflict.

🧪Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows

From nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

UK gets first female Astronomer Royal in 350 years Prof Michele Dougherty is the first woman to be appointed to the influential post.

Big day for the matriarchy! 🥳 Huge congrats to the awesome Prof. Doughtery, lead on the Jupiter-bound ESA JUICE mission & STFC Exec Chair.

If anyone's confused on the astro royal hierarchy: Michele and I are the astro equivalents of 🇬🇧Westminster and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Holyrood 🤗

ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 👩‍🔬🔭🧪

Grazie Alessandra 🥰

Our sister institute at Durham, the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, are advertising for a five year lectureship position 🔭☄️
Advertisement is here, have a look and come join us in pretty Durham: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...
#astrosci

Sgt Pepper Beatles in NAM 2025 group photo

🔭 Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, UK astronomy version. Inspired by a comment from LOC chair David Alexander at #NAM2025 🔭

I have a lot of thoughts here, but the most basic one is that it's insane that we've allowed people to get so rich that they can basically fund this with their own money while at the same time not providing any real mechanism for governmental oversight or regulation.

DAY 3 #NAM2025durham 🌟

Midweek at #NAM2025 brings one of our busiest days of sessions! Join us for these special events:
🎨 Artwork unveiling in OCW including dance and poetry performances
🎲 board games night in the TLC

And reminder to vote for most engaging exhibitor by 5pm!

yeh maybe. Worth experimenting with 😅

That's probably true within the world of academia. Outside of that I think many people see uni profs primarily as "people who teach", not sure they know about the research, etc. part of the job. E.g. people often ask me if I have 3 months of holiday in summer since "uni is closed, students are away"

My awesome PhD student 🤩

my title was asst prof, but I kinda preferred lecturer, especially when talking about my job to people outside academia. I've literally had people say "oh are you a professor's assistant?", whereas "lecturer" always got the message across. "reader" would probably confuse people though.

A montage of space related images including a simulation of the cosmic web, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and people looking up at the Milky Way in the night sky.

We're excited to be hosting almost 1,000 leading space scientists at the @royalastrosoc.bsky.social ‪National Astronomy Meeting #NAM2025 next week, 7 to 11 July! Leading up to NAM, discover more about our amazing research into the mysteries of the Universe 👉 www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...

Astronomers have spied an interstellar object zooming through the Solar System An object dubbed 3I/ATLAS is only the third interloper from outside the Solar System seen in all of human history.

Still confused by all the fuss about our new interstellar visitor? check out this new explainer by @astrokirsten.bsky.social ☄️🔭🧪
theconversation.com/astronomers-...

A photo of the slide with the December 2026 release date

Finding out about Gaia at #EAS2025Cork! ☄️

Just announced: Gaia DR4 will be released in December 2026!

agreed 😤

yes, that's exactly how I see it too. Mostly unnecessary nowadays but a harmless, quaint tradition, leftover from the olden days, that adds a bit of excitement to submitting a paper 😅 #arXiv