zoe hackshaw

finished project hail mary by andy weir! i loved it! &as someone that doesn’t consume astrophysical fiction ✨

“Do you believe in God? […] I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing […] The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe”

An infographic titled "How BIG are the BLACK HOLES we find with GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?" by @astronerdika. The graphic displays a range of black hole masses detected via gravitational waves, categorized by their size in solar masses (mass of the Sun) and represented with playful cat-like black hole illustrations. The categories from left to right are: 1. "<5 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "smol" - Very small black hole illustration represented by a curled up black cat - Arrow pointing left: "THIS WAY TO NEUTRON STARS" - Example: "Big component of GW230529 (~3.6 times the mass of the Sun)" 2. "~10 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "basic" - Slightly larger black hole cat illustration - Caption: "LOTS OF BLACK HOLES" 3. "~35–45 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "hefty" - Bigger black hole cat illustration - Continues the idea of a populated range 4. ">60 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "chonky" - Large black hole cat illustration - Caption: "FORBIDDEN TERRITORY? (can these even be made from the collapse of star cores?!)" - Example: "Components of GW190521 (~85 + ~66 times the mass of the Sun)" 5. ">100 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "oh lawd" - Very large, curled-up black hole cat illustration - Arrow pointing right: "THIS WAY TO INTERMEDIATE MASS BLACK HOLES" - Example: "Components of GW231123 (~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun)" Below the categories is a stylized black curve representing the inferred population of black holes detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. It rises sharply in the "basic" range and falls off toward the "hefty" and "chonky" ranges, with a note reading: "this curve is an artistic representation of the black hole population inferred by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA." This infographic draws from the “Chonky Cat” meme.

Heard the latest news from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration? We detected the collision of the most massive pair of black holes so far: #GW231123 weighing in at ~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun!

So to celebrate, here’s a handy chart ✨

Just how chonky are these black holes? 🤔

Kickin’ It Into Overdrive With Stellar Escapees Follow along as we zoom through the stars with these hypervelocity stellar survivors and uncover their explosive origins.

From Mckenzie Ferrari: Follow along as we zoom through the stars with these hypervelocity stellar survivors and uncover their explosive origins. 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/07/22/h...

Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V (SDSS-V) is pioneering panoptic spectroscopy: it is the first all-sky, multi-epoch, optical-to-infrared spectroscopic survey. SDSS-V is mapping the sky with multi-object...

Today is a big day for us: it's DATA RELEASE DAY!!! And to celebrate our nineteenth data release, we have not one, but two papers for you to read all about our data: we have a DR19 paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.07093) and an SDSS-V Overview paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.06989) #DR19

Looking for a single stellar ancestor: Mono-enriched stars in zoom-in simulations Today's bite explores if we'll be able to find a star that has formed from the gas enriched by only one stellar predecessor, an interesting way to probe what's actually happening in stellar nucleosynt...

From Caroline von Raesfeld: Today’s bite explores if we’ll be able to find a star that has formed from the gas enriched by only one stellar predecessor, an interesting way to probe what’s actually happening in stellar nucleosynthesis. 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/07/08/l...

‘One of the true final frontiers’ — Sally Ride biopic highlights the struggle of gay astronauts The first US woman to fly in space said little about her personal life in public. A candid film discloses the pressures she endured.

NASA is erasing much of its progress towards inclusivity — a shameful change that goes against everything astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride worked for. My review of the new biopic SALLY, for @nature.com:

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

🧪🚀👩‍🚀🏳️‍🌈

Today for @blackinastro.bsky.social's theme of #ShareTheUniverse for 🪐 Black in Space Week 🔭, we have two very special interview articles with black astronomers Logan White and Phoenix-Avery Sarian! Summaries for each article and links in the thread below ⬇️!

Decks of cards marked Event, Time and Science Goal. Some of the cards lie face up. A scoresheet lies next to the cards.

How do astronomers decide that objects to observe? You and your students can now map the cosmos with our new card game.

We've distributed copies of to several SDSS institutions and anyone can download and print their own copy from the link below

voyages.sdss.org/hands-on-act...

the night sky right outside of big bend National park. Featuring Orion’s Belt and betelgeuse!

road puppy!!! (Not actually, just a coyote)

the disk of the Milky Way as pictured during a big bend star party

Me, a little chilly but cheering very big hiking the Santa Elena canyon. The land on the left is Mexico and the land on the right is the US!

in appreciation and solidarity of our national parks, some pictures of my January big bend trip🏜️the beauty, knowledge, and community the parks bring truly cannot be stated enough.

and half the park is after dark!🔭

Tired of wondering which atomic lines are in your spectra? You need:

*whose line is it anyway?* An interactive tool for identifying atomic spectral lines. 🧪🔭 #stars

install:
pip install whoseline

source:
github.com/bmorris3/who...

MUTUAL AID ALERT:
Stand with our community in Astro+ adjacent fields impacted by the attack on DEIA, support our community by giving aid through our GoFundMe. See links in thread!
- choir collab, @blackinastro.bsky.social, Astro Poverty Survey Team, MVMT Consulting @dranicole.bsky.social)

Thank you!! It is crazy standing next to this and thinking "wow this is the biggest thing I've ever seen" meanwhile there's a 10m telescope on the next mountain over!

So glad I decided to get out of my comfort zone to try one of the feeds (Science by @bossett.social). Immediately shown cool stuff like this paper that introduced me to the coolest job ever of "Galactic archaeology". How much do I understand? Maybe 10%. Am I fascinated? 100%.

This is so kind! We use stars as fossils to piece together the creation of the Milky Way 🌌 Nothing better than getting to learn new science 🤩

Merci beaucoup!!

This particular night I was observing several different metal-poor stars in the disk of our Galaxy, looking for heavy elements (like Uranium and Thorium)

Luckily haven't encountered any pigeons! I was on the lookout for bears though😁

A graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, from 1958 to 4th February 2025. It shows carbon dioxide levels rising at an accelerating rate over the decades. This is known to be due to emissions of carbon dioxide from human activity, mainly fossil fuel burning but also deforestation. The first CO2 concentration value in March 1958 was 315 parts per million (ppm). The latest daily value is 426 ppm. The graph also shows a seasonal cycle of a few ppm within each year, which is known to be linked to the growing season in the northern hemisphere causing a temporary uptake of carbon in spring and summer and release in autumn. The graph is produced routinely by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Although NOAA's page on atmospheric CO2 levels has vanished, you can still get this vital information from Ralph Keeling's team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego keelingcurve.ucsd.edu

Please follow bsky.app/profile/keel... for updates and share

Don't let science be hidden

Have you ever wondered what it looks like when an astronomer starts up a 2.7m telescope for the night? Wonder no more 🔭

Wobbling stars reveal hidden companions in Gaia data

🔭 Our Gaia telescope has revealed two mysterious objects: a huge exoplanet & a brown dwarf, both orbiting low-mass stars, a scenario thought to be extremely rare.

This is the first time a planet has been discovered by Gaia’s ability to sense wobbling stars 👉 esa.int/Science_Expl...

🔭 don't miss out on our investigation on the Galactic disk, mapping chemical azimuthal variations🗺️

I am a third year graduate student studying Galactic archeology and stellar spectroscopy, researching the formation of the Milky Way with the light we get from stars in our Galaxy🔭

yes !

@bot.astronomy.blue signup :)

This periodic table depicts the primary source on Earth for each element: from the Big Bang, massive stars, white-dwarf supernovae, merging neutron stars, low-mass stars, or other processes. In cases where two sources contribute fairly equally, both appear.

You've probably heard that "we are stardust," but this graphic breaks it down and tells you what kind of stars your dust came from--and which elements didn't come from stars at all. 🧪

svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13873/

instead of listening to music while working, I now listen to 6+ hour long youtube videos of fantasy (usually throne of glass or recently, fourth wing) ambient noise with soft music, boots walking through snow and/or book pages turning. productivity 📈

Thank you so much Natalie!!🤍

All of this to say, the chemistry of stars in the disk can be funky and it can be hard to disentangle the root cause of observed patterns in the disk. Next steps include diving into simulations to "turn on" different processes to get a better look at what's going on physically 🤓

Thanks for reading!

That while this red-blue-red pattern may have some contribution from natal origins, there is a dynamical component!

To show that, we plotted the absolute [Fe/H] excess against 6 dynamical parameters. Stars that have a higher metallicity excess tend to have a higher eccentricity and radial action🏃