Joseph Karpinski

Synthetic image of the star's shape, which was made with a stellar model that is consistent with the observations. The star is shaped like rugby ball, and it is an asymmetric brightness distribution. The star is white-hot near the pole, to the lower left, and blueish near the equator.

gamma Cas is a naked-eye star 550 light years away, and you've seen it as the middle star in the group of five that makes the "W" shape in Cassiopeia.🔭🧪

It spins *so fast* that it's rugby ball shaped, and coming apart. New observations show that it would look like this:

arxiv.org/abs/2506.15027

Rest-frame UV and optical NIRSpec spectra of EXCELS-70864 at ⁠z = 5.255. The black and grey lines show the spectrum and error spectrum, respectively.

Published in #MNRAS: "The JWST EXCELS survey: direct estimates of C, N, and O abundances in two relatively metal-rich galaxies at z ≃ 5", Arellano-Córdova et al. This is Fig. 1: to read the paper please visit academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... @oxfordacademic.bsky.social @royalastrosoc.bsky.social

A very vertical image of a tall, thin portion of a nebula that appears to stand like a tree. The top is made up of large brown and blue pale clouds and dust that look like voluminous hair. To the right of the clouds is a dark rugged shape, surrounded by a bright red light. Below the clouds is a dark stem, made of tendrils of dust, wrapping around themselves to the bottom of the image, where the tendrils widen and expand like a tornado-like dust cloud. The background has several stars of different colors and sizes, and the shade of the background changes from light blue at top to dark red at the bottom.

New image processing techniques “refreshed” older Hubble data showing a portion of the Eagle Nebula. This structure is 9.5 light-years tall and 7,000 light-years distant from Earth, and is one of many nebulas in the Milky Way.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA. 🔭 🧪

This Revolutionary New Observatory Will Locate Threatening Asteroids and Millions of Galaxies Beginning next year, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will use the world’s largest digital camera to give us a whole new view of the universe

The revolutionary Vera Rubin Observatory is just 5 days away from "first light." Recently in @smithsonianmag.bsky.social I wrote about the groundbreaking #science that we can expect from Rubin (which includes the world's largest digital camera!):
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu... #astronomy

NASA Just Found One of the Coldest Planets Ever – And It’s in a Twisted Orbit Webb has captured a frigid exoplanet in a wildly tilted orbit, revealing a system shaped by past planetary violence and intriguing atmospheric behavior.

It’s absolutely mindblowing that JWST can directly image exoplanets, even when they’re *below freezing* and are extra hard to see in the infrared light that JWST is sensitive to 🧪🔭
scitechdaily.com/nasa-just-fo...

This image shows a detailed, thousand-colour image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionised hydrogen in star-forming regions. These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here. Credit: ESO/E. Congiu et al.

This is Figure 3 of the "Cosmography of the Local Universe" aforementioned article. It shows two projections of the Local Group and its immediate vicinity. Three concentric blue circles separated by 2 Mpc = 150 km s−1 lie in the supergalactic plane. The top panel is a view normal to the plane and gives the best separation of the principal groups. Solid circles, gray squares, and open triangles identify galaxies, respectively, in, above, and below the plane. The view in the bottom panel is almost edge-on to the supergalactic plane and emphasizes the concentration of galaxies in this plane and the extreme emptiness of a large region above the plane. In the top panel, the NGC 253 galaxy group is encircled, in the direction of the galactic south.

A galactic masterpiece: a stunning image of NGC 253 has just been released by @eso.org. If you're wondering where it is located in our cosmic neighborhood, here it is indicated in a map from our Cosmography of the Local Universe paper.

📷 www.eso.org/public/news/...
🗺️ doi.org/10.1088/0004... 🧪🔭

Breaking space news: We have made our own solar eclipse in space! 🌘

Today, we release the first images from our Proba-3 mission, which flies two spacecraft in precise formation to create artificial solar eclipses in orbit.

Learn more ➡️ www.esa.int/Enabling_Sup...

Webb 'UNCOVERs' galaxy population driving cosmic renovation Astronomers using data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have identified dozens of small galaxies that played a starring role in a cosmic makeover that transformed the early universe into the one...

JWST observations find lots of small starburst galaxies in the early Universe. These galaxies produce ultraviolet light and might explain how hydrogen was first ionised, turning the Universe transparent for the first time 🧪🔭 phys.org/news/2025-06...

The Rubin Observatory is just stunning!
Discovered this gem while making live-stream-tech-failure-back-up slides for the big 23rd June First Look reveal! 🤓
Watch parties are taking place across the globe. If you're in #Edinburgh, join us at Dynamic Earth.🔭🧪
ℹ️: rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-f...

Astronomers have found the home address for the universe's 'missing' matter A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center fo...

Astronomers traced the universe’s missing matter to ionized gas threading between galaxies, using signals from fast radio bursts to finally confirm its location.
🧪🔭
#CosmicWeb
#FRBs
#Astrophysics

Paper
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Alternate link
www.space.com/astronomy/sc...

Wanna learn about what I do? This is a very very surface level overview of my research! 🔭🧪

1.5TB of James Webb Space Telescope data dumped on the internet — new searchable database is the largest window into our universe to date New imagery encompassing nearly 800,000 galaxies.

NASA’s COSMOS Web team released 1.5 TB of James Webb data. Nearly 800,000 galaxies were captured in high detail, now available in a searchable public database.
🧪🔭
#JWST
#CosmicSurvey
#AstroData

Interactive viewer:
cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap.html

Data archive
mast.stsci.edu/portal/Mashu...

An excited girl stretches out her arms to display a large tube installed in the Mayall 4m telescope

A model of the curiosity Rover made with gingerbread

A pie that's decorated to look like a pie chart of the contents of the Universe

A poster of a astronomical survey drawn in the style of an old world map

Heyo! I just joined Bluesky and am an astrophysics PhD student. I enjoy figuring out how to condense information- whether it be for galaxy statics, outreach, or decorating science bakes 🌌

This movie shows the bubbling surface of a distant star, as captured with unprecedented clarity by the ALMA observatory.

R Doradus is a huge star. Each of these bubbles is 50-75 times the diameter of our entire Sun! 🧪🔭

www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-rel...

Let’s do a quick look at galaxy NGC 7479

skyserver.sdss.org/dr17/VisualT...

portal.nersc.gov/project/cosm...

esahubble.org/images/archi...

atlas.obs-hp.fr/hyperleda/le...

sga.legacysurvey.org?galaxy__matc...

Astrobites Readership Survey Periodically, the Astrobites collaboration likes to learn a bit more about who is using Astrobites. Please fill out this short survey to help guide our work moving forward!

Do you ever use @astrobites.bsky.social ??? If so, we want to hear from you! We’ve got a survey going to better understand how people use our site and what you would like to see going forward. Find it here: forms.gle/HCLtcMVbwU11...

These are absolute beast papers (complimentary), and there is SO MUCH good #RadioAstronomy here using the #ASKAP telescope.

Lots of folks from the Aussie radio astro community involved in these📡🔭

I can't wait to read these papers! 🙌

New blog post on the heels of our Foundation Models in Astronomy workshop at the CCA.

jwuphysics.github.io/blog/2025/05...

🌌🔭🧪 #astrosci

Come be a Senior Cloud Engineer at @stsci.edu, supporting humanity's greatest space telescopes. 🔭 🧪 #astrocode

recruiting2.ultipro.com/SPA1004AURA/...

NASA’s IXPE Reveals X-ray-Generating Particles in Black Hole Jets - NASA Data from NASA’s IXPE enables astronomers to learn more about black hole jets known as blazars.

New polarisation measurements from IXPE show that supermassive black hole jets produce X-rays by scattering of light by electrons (Compton scattering), solving the mystery of whether it is electrons or protons doing the scattering 🔭🧪
www.nasa.gov/centers-and-...

NASA delays astrophysics mission call for proposals amid budget uncertainties NASA is delaying the next competition for an astrophysics mission by a year, the latest sign of the fiscal pressures from an upcoming budget proposal.

NASA delays astrophysics mission call for proposals amid budget uncertainties

NASA is delaying the next competition for an astrophysics mission by a year, the latest sign of the fiscal pressures from an upcoming budget proposal.

Quantifying the Limits of TESS Stellar Rotation Measurements with the K2-TESS Overlap The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has provided stellar rotation periods across much of the sky through high-precision light curves, but the reliability and completeness of these measure...

New results from the Young Worlds Lab!
arxiv.org/abs/2504.13262

So you measured a stars' rotation period using a TESS light curve, how good is it? That's the question we wanted to answer with this paper.
🔭🧪⭐🌌 #exoplanets

New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI The sub-Neptune frontier has opened a new window into the rich diversity of planetary environments beyond the solar system. The possibility of hycean worlds, with planet-wide oceans and H$_2$-rich atm...

The K2-18b paper is now up as a preprint (to be followed by the final paper soon) arxiv.org/abs/2504.12267

A nerd stands in a stairwell overlooking a train track. He’s wearing a navy blue suit, a shirt with crossing pink and blue lines, and a black tie with white writing that says E=mc^2 in a bunch of places and fonts

If you can’t wear an E=mc^2 tie to a student #physics honor society induction dinner, then there is simply nowhere you can wear it.

Text reads 'Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship 2025' and includes the deadline of 30 April to apply by on a nebula background with comets and an image of Caroline Herschel.

🚨 Reminder 🚨

We're welcoming applications for the 2025 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship. 🔭🎓

The Lectureship was established to celebrate Caroline's memory by supporting promising women astronomers early in their careers. 👩‍🔬

To apply, visit herschelsociety.org.uk/caroline-her...

A few more screenshots

More screenshots

DESI DR1

Let’s use NoirLab Astro DataLab Jupyter Notebooks
to explore DESI DR1

www.legacysurvey.org/viewer/desi-...

www.legacysurvey.org/viewer/desi-...

datalab.noirlab.edu/query.php?na...

github.com/astro-datala...

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...

The author’s hand holding a copy of 40 Ways to Know A Star, by Jillian Scudder, PhD, against a beige wall.

Hello folks in spite of The Everything™️, my next book is out in one week!! 7 days!

If you would like to have a small heavily illustrated book tell you about the stars illuminating our understanding of the cosmos, this is your book!

To preorder (US): bookshop.org/p/books/fort...

🧪🔭📚 #booksky