Dr. Heloise Stevance

The Moon-forming impactor Theia originated from the inner Solar System The Moon formed from a giant impact of a planetary body, called Theia, with proto-Earth. It is unknown whether Theia formed in the inner or outer Solar System. We measured iron isotopes in lunar sampl...

A giant impact between proto-Earth and a planet called Theia produced the Moon. Hopp et al. use isotopic measurements of lunar samples and cosmochemical modelling to show that Theia formed in the inner Solar System, probably closer to the Sun than Earth. ☄️ #planetsci
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

When you feel vulnerable, whatever the reason, try to stop your brain focusing on the things you lack, and analyse the things you can bring and share with the group. Sometimes all we have to bring to the table is enthusiasm and time, but that's already a lot.

Happy Science!

And this analysis will depend on the crowd you're in and the theme of interest. But for example it can be that you have a closer link to the day-to-day challenges of the science or the method because you ACTUALLY DO IT (professor delegate).

Maybe you know a novel method, maybe you have QUESTIONS!

When you're the youngest in the room, there will be things you have less of: titles, number of papers, research achievements. It's when we focus on these that we talk ourselves down or over compensate.

So we need to focus on what we have MORE of:

Don't talk yourself down, but don't over-compensate.

When we feel "small" humans have one of two common ways of coping: Some will talk themselves down in an attempt to raise sympathy from the crowd; some will exaggerate their confidence or achievement to feel less small.

There's another way...

Me standing behind a podium (left hand side) on a large stage (15 meters across?) with a very large wall-screen displaying my title slide "Virtual Research Assistants for Sky Surveys; Intelligence is in the Design not in the Models"

Last week I had the honour to speak at the 5th Innovation Forum for Intelligent Computing at Zheijang Lab, and share my voice on a panel with experts with a lot more seniority.

Here are some tips for early career researchers for when you're the youngest in the room and feeling small

🧪🔭

Cannot generate simple excel files on pro version Question So I have used ChatGPT pro for a while now and recently I have been facing an issue while trying to collate data from pdfs and put it in an excel sheet where in my chat it keeps asking me questions when it finally gets down to generating an excel sheet it never gives me the me the link to download the file. After multiple attempts when it does give me a lin k to download the excel file I rec an error which says file not found. Starting to grow frustrated with this now. Look forward to any suggestions to tackle this #problem

This person is paying OpenAI two hundred dollars a month to have a chatbot gaslight them about making an excel spreadsheet

We are pleased to announce that the Astrophysics Centre for Multimessenger Studies in Europe (ACME) EU-funded project has officially launched its online platform for virtual access to multi-messenger expertise. 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

support.acme-astro.eu

Details in the thread below and on: www.acme-astro.eu

Ice Crystals in the atmosphere!

Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide I didn’t write this to make you cry.Not for you to tell me: “Poor you.”I write this so I can hang these words around your neck—to make you bear the responsibility of my perspective,the responsibility ...

Today is the release day of Gazan physics student Wasim Said's memoir of life under the genocide. 🧪

You should grab a copy. #BookSky

1804books.com/products/wit...

A high fraction of close massive binary stars at low metallicity - Nature Astronomy The analysis of radial velocity variations of O-type stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud reveals a large fraction of close binaries, suggesting that binary physics also plays a prominent role in the l...

"no evidence supporting a statistically significant trend of [O star] multiplicity properties with metallicity" still high (~70%) in the SMC - interesting! 🔭🧪 #AstroSci #extragalactic

How long do we give the techno-bros to start weaponising DEI by saying their fave AI is conscious and has feelings and saying otherwise is "dehumanizing" and cruel?

That’s a much better title yeah

AI tool developed at Oxford helps astronomers find supernovae in a A new AI-powered tool has reduced astronomers’ workload by 85% - filtering through thousands of data alerts to identify the few genuine signals caused by supernovae (powerful explosions from dying

My preferred title "Bot does Astronomers' Cosmic Laundry"

But I guess it didn't sound serious enough.

Fun fact the tool still works even though we added a whole new telescope in the stream this summer and without retraining 🤣🫶

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

Design.

The hardest part of applied ML is asking the right question and choosing the right metrics.

Once you've done that you can pick the right model and in science it's often not the biggest newest thing!

ML is not a dick measuring contest but I'll leave this for another rant later today 💅

"AI-powered" is obviously a marketing term.

My models use a nifty little trick called Histogram Based Gradient Boosted Decision trees.

TL;DR it approximates complex probability distributions by adding loads of small functions (here trees).

Why is it smart if it's so simple?

1/2 #AstroSci

AI tool helps astronomers find supernovae in a sky full of noise A new AI-powered tool has reduced astronomers' workload by 85%—filtering through thousands of data alerts to identify the few genuine signals caused by supernovae (powerful explosions from dying stars...

Nice work by @sydonahi.bsky.social
phys.org/news/2025-09...

Diagram showing 3 cartoon "monsters" all with straight tails to illustrate that if you only have the tail you can't do classification properly.

Reminder that you can take your science seriously without taking yourself too seriously.

#AstroSci 🧪

The Astrosky Ecosystem - Open Collective We're building an open-source ecosystem of social media tools for the space science & astronomy communities.

For the last two years, I've been paying for the Astronomy feeds hosting myself.

It has been a privilege to grow our community here, but I also shouldn't keep doing it for free 😅

That's why I'm delighted to announce that we now have a donations page on Open Collective! 🔭☄️ #astrophotography

A full late-time (t > 150d) multi-wavelength (radio - X-ray) SED of SN 2023ixf.

New from Wynn Jacobson-Galán ! it’s so cool to see such an expansive spectral energy distribution (SED) of such an extraordinary event.

arxiv.org/abs/2508.11747

🧪🔭☄️

Well... the discussion around 3I/ATLAS continues to... evolve. This object is super exciting, fascinating, worthy of a LOT of study and press! ALSO so far as I have seen, & from every solar system expert I've talked to (and I know a lot of 'em!), it looks like a comet, not a spaceship.
🔭🧪☄️

But everyone goes for viridis (hahaha cuz it's the default)

Happy to deliver

Aimed for plasma, got magma. Winning

Aimed for plasma, got magma

My face and hair (white, yellow, orange, purple, black)

Guess which matplotlib colour map this was inspired by.

🧪🔭 #AstroSci

Sidereal time is the time in which the moon looks the same relative to background stars my bad I got the two confused 😅

PS if you’re a member of the press: I and my colleagues will happily talk about 3I/ATLAS until the (interstellar) cows come home. But my only comment on whether it’s an alien spacecraft is: Avi is talking nonsense on stilts, and doesn’t understand comets.

I see the first articles in the UK press giving space to the claim that 3I/ATLAS is an alien spacecraft. Briefly:

It’s a comet that formed billions of years ago, passing through our Solar System.

It’s behaving like a comet.

There is no evidence it’s artificial.

Thanks! I knew bluesky woulD come through