Payel Das

I'm very excited to announce a PhD position that will be supervised by Eugene Vasiliev and myself on the dynamical modelling of barred galaxies. Check it out!

I like this theory too! It's like watching a very slow release Netflix series...

Paper time! @amerygration.bsky.social develops a general method for constructing the joint mass function of a stellar population that hosts binary stellar systems. And no it's not the same as the initial mass function!

I love that we're pushing back major epochs of galaxy evolution further back in time!

I couldn't helping thinking that we're possibly uncovering the merger history of GSE itself from its chemical abundances?

Chatted about this again over lunch with Surrey Astro! Very exciting paper.

Really interesting result here that the faint tidal tails tell us most about merger activity.

My favourite statistic from this week's podcast - JWST sees 100,000 galaxies in the area spanned by the moon!

JWST and machine-learning are definitely recurring favourites!

Recovery of total mass profile, dark matter mass profile, and flattening of the dark matter halo with 3D phase-space information.

Excited about the latest paper with collaborators! We find that in the case of missing phase-space coordinates, equilibrium dynamical models can recover the mass distribution and inclination of disc galaxies well but not the dark matter halo flattening! Find out more at arxiv.org/abs/2511.10445.

Episode 22 is out!!! With a Tolkien theme 😂

Just coming back from holiday and didn’t check arxiv? Absolutely no worries. Catch up on Starxiv! Episode 20 being recorded very soon.

Episode 18 is being recorded later today and for the first time I’ll be a listener! Excited to sit back and catch up with the papers I missed whilst in China.

Finding it tricky to keep up with the arxiv over the summer between holidays and childcare? Let @runningastronomer.bsky.social and i help you out with @starxiv.bsky.social!

Episode 17 has dropped! Tune in to hear Payel & Michelle talk about about a dark matter subhalo detection, the problem(s) with super massive black holes, massive star clusters in the Sparkler, speedy white dwarfs and more! 🔭☄️ starxiv.com/2025/08/04/e...

In short, dynamical processes don’t quite do enough. Have we massively under-predicted the lensing effect?

A neat little explanation to tie some JWST loose ends.

Some beautiful new artwork to help you listen to the Starxiv!

What’s better than passing time on the train catching up on arxiv papers?

Catching up with papers after a week’s worth of work travel. It’s going to take a while…😳

If you want to join our wonderful astrophysics research group here at Surrey, please get in touch with @derkal.bsky.social!

That's some pretty big stars :)

What a beautiful serendipitous discovery!

Perhaps time to move on from alpha abundance ratios?

Planetary archaeology!

It was fun recording our first podcast with @nbuckley0810.bsky.social! For the astute amongst you, I've moved office (hence the boxes...).

I've already got my list!

I'm feeling very excited about reading my @starxiv.bsky.social papers for tomorrow's podcast with @runningastronomer.bsky.social. It's starting to get pretty addictive...

Who doesn't want to read papers on the weekend? @runningastronomer.bsky.social and I just love reading papers.

My takeaway from this paper is that if we observe this planet for long enough (it might take a decade...) we will get enough signal-to-noise to more definitely exclude or claim life!