Dr Ashley J Ruiter

Jimmy the cavoodle puppy lying in his bed looking at camera with puppy dog eyes rest-biting his favourite bunny toy.

Apparently it's #internationaldogday 🐶 Our little floofer is 9 months tomorrow 💗

Fantastic to see the 2026-2035 Astronomy Decadal Plan launched at the Annual Science Meeting. What better way to celebrate than cake! We look forward to continuing to support the Australian astronomy community to implement this inspiring plan. Read the plan here: t.co/HUGz9Vgn86

Oh I had to look that one up... 😂

Thanks for helping to put this together ESO PR team! Very excited to see the paper finally out in @natastron.nature.com 🧪🔭

A sprawling, textured field of galaxies scattered across the deep black of space. It is filled with the delicate smudges and glowing cores of galaxies of many shapes, sizes and colors, as well as the bright multi-colored points of stars. The image focuses on a collection of interacting galaxies connected by delicate streams of stars. At top center lies a large elliptical galaxy that is dense and smooth, like a polished stone glowing with golden light. Like delicate spider silk or stretched taffy, these stellar bridges link the large elliptical to the few larger galaxies beneath, evidence of past collisions. All throughout the image, thousands of galaxies gather in clusters or are spread throughout, like glittering gems strewn on a table. Some are sharp-edged and spiral, like coiled ribbons; others round and diffuse, like polished pebbles. Still others are just smudges of various colors against the black of space. The background is peppered with pinpoint stars in reds, yellows, and blues, crisp against the velvet black.

A cosmic tapestry of glowing tan and pink gas clouds with dark dust lanes. In the upper right, the Trifid Nebula resembles a small flower in space. Its soft, pinkish gas petals are surrounded by blue gas, and streaked with dark, finger-like veins of dust that divide it into three parts. It radiates a gentle, misty glow, diffuse and soft like the warmth of breath on a cold hand. To the lower left, the much larger Lagoon Nebula stretches wide like a churning sea of magenta gas, with bright blue, knotted clumps sprinkled throughout where new stars are born. Both nebulae are embedded in a soft tan backdrop of gas that is brighter on the left than on the right, etched with dark tendrils of dust and sprinkled with the pinpricks of millions of stars.

A sprawling, textured field of galaxies scattered across the deep black of space. It is filled with the delicate smudges and glowing cores of galaxies of many shapes, sizes and colors, as well as the bright multi-colored points of stars. To the lower left is a region filled with the hundreds of golden glittering gems of a distant galaxy cluster. In the foreground, below and right of center, two blue spiral galaxies look like eyes beneath the entangled mass of a triple galaxy merger in the upper right. A few bright blue points of foreground stars pierce the glittering tapestry. All throughout the image, thousands of galaxies gather in clusters or are spread throughout, like glittering gems strewn on a table. Some are sharp-edged and spiral, like coiled ribbons; others round and diffuse, like polished pebbles. Still others are just smudges of various colors against the black of space. The background is peppered with pinpoint stars in reds, yellows, and blues, crisp against the velvet black.

Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory!

Can you guess these regions of sky?

This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪

#RubinFirstLook
ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream

🌞 See the Sun from a whole new angle.

For the first time, our Solar Orbiter mission has captured close-up images of the Sun’s mysterious poles, regions long hidden from our view.

A black and white photo of Prince, next to a column on text in a magazine spread. His right hand is outstretched, with his thumb and fingers pointing out three orthogonal directions, they have been labeled F, v, and B as a mnemonic for determining the direction of magnetic force on a moving positive charge.

If you teach physics, Prince can help your students learn the Right Hand Rule. 🎢

Portrait photo of Katie Mack. She is smiling and looking towards the right of the image.

Yo, #Sydney and #Melbourne!

Some exciting news! Over last few months have been planning an excellent #SciComm event for our cities.

We're hosting @astrokatie.com here in Oz for two weeks to talk about 'The End of Everything!' and more fun science.

Got a fantastic program planned for you!

1/3 🔭

For those of us who made the poor choice to have our life’s work governed by orbital mechanics, 4 years can change a project from “some really interesting science to do towards the end of my career”into “won’t happen in my lifetime”

(Looking at you Uranus orbiter)

Pretty big coronal mass ejection from the Sun hit us last night. The results are beautiful.

Harvard launches short online FREE course on understanding US government and democracy (and more) pll.harvard.edu/course/we-pe...

This week’s image is of type Ia supernovae! Optical and NIR spectra taken with Gemini's GMOS and Flamingos-2 helped assess the goodness of various models that constrain the explosion, progenitor star, and binary companion. Check out the 🧵 for more papers on supernovae! #astronomy

📷 credit in thread

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Physics Company Description: Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of AucklandKo te whare Pūtaiao | The Faculty of Science at the University of Auckland is the leading science faculty in New Zealand and one of...

So the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland is looking to hire a lecturer/senior lecturer in one of the following areas:

- Physics education research,
- Quantum optics and quantum information,
- Biophotonics and/or medical physics,
- Astrophysics and/or space technology.

1/2...

View of Rubin Observatory's massive telescope structure inside the observatory dome. The telescope is a teal steel structure shaped like a squat vase with a round bottom. To the left, a large white donut-shaped screen is mounted on the dome wall, about two-thirds the size of the telescope structure. Just above the telescope, the vertical dome slit is slightly open, showing a blue-purple night sky outside. The interior of the dome is silver metal above and black light-blocking screen s on the sides, all criss-crossed by teal support beams.

Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: The data deluge from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory is coming!

Rubin captured over 500 exposures per night across 3 nights this week, using its automated observation scheduler — that’s 20x more than during the 7 week period with the engineering camera last year!🔭 🧪

🧵

🙁

K2-33b, shown in this illustration, is one of the youngest exoplanets detected to date using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Science: Roman Space Telescope article (Aug 8, 2024)

NASA's future missions will rely on citizen scientists to help discover new exoplanets beyond our solar system.

science.nasa.gov/open-science/exoplanet-future-citizen-science/

This is great, but it's also a little depressing that it's unfunded and fishing for philanthropic support.

An obit for Alicia Soderberg, a lovely person who will be much missed. I met Alicia when she was an undergrad student in my summer REU research progam; she later became a valued teacher in the same program, mentoring many students who themselves went on to success.

A fisheye lens view of the night sky taken from the ground of an astronomical observatory. Several telescope domes and other buildings are arranged around the circular frame. The sky glows in green hues and it is filled with stars. The band of the Milky Way galaxy is visible in the middle.

What's the magical green glow that dominates the sky in this pic of ESO’s La Silla Observatory? 🧐

Known as airglow, it's a faint light emitted by the Earth’s atmosphere and it is only visible in the darkest of places.

What causes it? Find out here: www.eso.org/public/image...

🔭 🧪

📷 J. Pérez/ESO

Finally!

We can start to talk about the absolute carnage that is magnetic field orientation of Neptune.

What even is this absolute chaos?! How?!?!

Why is Neptune like this???!!!

(I love Neptune, probably equal first with Jove)

📸 Aplin et al. 2020 Space Science Reviews

Duckworth: "Hegseth is the most unqualified sec def in history & this is further demonstrating his incompetence. He's literally leaking classified war plans via group chat...if you're our allies, I'd be thinking twice about sharing classified information...All these people need to lose their jobs"

Meanwhile, in Europe👇

The atomic spectral lines in this app come from the NIST atomic spectroscopy group, which has provided the world with spectroscopic measurements for 120 years.

Today we got word that the federal government is laying off the entire group. 🔭🧪

A black and white photo of Vera Rubin measuring spectra

Vera Rubin has been selected to be featured on the back of a quarter. She is the first astronomer to be honored this way. Read about her research on the Andromeda galaxy and how it led to the discovery of dark matter in this article written by Rubin herself. doi.org/10.1063/1.24...
🔭 #WomenInStem

Today in 1982, Venera 13 landed on Venus, taking the first color photos of the surface of Venus. These are my reprocessed versions of the full panoramas.

The Legacy of Henrietta Leavitt: A Re-analysis of the First Cepheid Period-Luminosity Relation Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discovery of the relationship between the period and luminosity (hereafter the Leavitt Law) of 25 variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, published in 1912, revolutioniz...

Loved this historical paper on comparing Henrietta Swan Leavitt's Cepheid period-luminosity data & law to the most modern measurements of the same stars & same law - and remarkably, for century old data, it stacks up pretty well!

Our baby No.4 💕 He has 4 white socks 🧦🧦 and sharp baby teeth!

Agreed!

🧪⚛️

So are Vancouver bartenders whipping up a maple syrup and tequila cocktail?