Francesca Fragkoudi

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.

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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

am I... the only person who likes the game of "submit to arXiv at exact time to be first"? 👀
I totally understanding those who don't want to play it and submit at any time. I always go through the whole list anyway, or lately tend to use something like benty-fields which sorts the papers for me

haha sounds like an interesting exercise!

thanks 😊

gracias! 😊

thank you 🤩

allowing myself a small moment of pride to say that I'm really happy to have been promoted to associate professor 😊

which, which, go on tell us :)

What's that you say? You don't have 400 HD TVs to see the #RubinFirstLook images at full resolution? Fear not, surf through Rubin's view of the cosmos with the @vrubinobs.bsky.social skyviewer app!

Click the link to visit these little beauties 🥰 🧪🔭
🏄‍♀️: skyviewer.app

wow look at how deep the VRubin image is!

much stars, very beautiful 🤩

When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment Analysis of almost three million children captures when ‘mathematical gender gap’ first emerges and could help focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind.

I don't post super often here, but I just came by to share this news article with you (published alongside the paper in Nature yesterday).

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

There are a couple of sentences in the news article that stuck with me more than anything:

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