Dr Libby Jones

The Milky Way arcs over and behind this view looking up at Rubin's shiny silver dome toward a starry night sky.

Alerts from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory have been flowing for about a week...how many have there been?? 🚨

So far, Rubin has generated....drumroll please🥁

~1.7 million world-public alerts!

That's ~1.7 MILLION objects that changed in brightness or position in just seven nights 🤯

🔭🧪

I rather like the Olympics and she won the Gold. It was the uks first trampolining Olympic medal. So it rather stood out.

Bryony Page :)

Rows of people wearing orange lanyards in a House of Commons committee hearing. At the front is Catherine sporting her "I'm about to perform an appendectomy" mask and looking particularly snazzy.

Here is my run-down of today's Science, Information & Technology Committee hearing (House of Commons) where @jonbutterworth.bsky.social @si-wills.bsky.social & I argued for no funding cuts, & Prof. Michele Doughtery explained why they were needed. The public gallery again packed with physicists 🔭👩‍🔬⚛️

@astroroyalscot.bsky.social Well done 👏

What a stunner. I did not expect such a large impact on the wider environment. Wow.

Two images of a planetary nebula in space. The image to the left, labelled “Euclid & Hubble”, shows the whole nebula and its surroundings. A star in the very centre is surrounded by white bubbles and loops of gas, all shining with a powerful blue light. Farther away a broken ring of red and blue gas clouds surrounds the nebula. The background shows many stars and distant galaxies. A white box indicates the centre of the nebula and this region is the image to the right, labelled “Hubble”. It shows the multi-layered bubbles, pointed jets and circular shells of gas that make up the nebula, as well as the central star, in greater detail.

🤝 Hubble has teamed up with Euclid to image the intricate Cat’s Eye Nebula! 😻

Combining their focused views highlights the nebula’s exquisite structure, while placing it within the broader context.

Read more 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...
🔭 🧪

Do you have a hole in your buckets?

Well, it's been a busy day prepping for my upcoming appearance in Westminster👇. The chocolate is all gone. This thread contains evidenced statistics to support the continued (not cut) funding for UK particle, astro and nuclear physics (PPAN). Thanks to everyone who contributed today! 🧵

NGC-2440 | NIRCAM #JWST

filters: f164n, f212n, f356w, f405n.

I played with the colors; if I followed the sequence of each filter like the Nircam chart, I didn't like the result.

Good luck!
Following on from this, is that postdocs etc are highly skilled and innovative. I would say even more so after one postdoc. So funding thay stage (even if leaving science after) is key to ensuring that skill stays is in the UK rather as once settled elsewhere it's hard to come back.

Planetarium Bochum sunset view, deep orange fading to dark blue. Saturn, Merkur and Venus are marked - tiny speaks in the twilight sky.

How are the #planetaryparade fans doing tonight? Clear skies here so I took up the challenge!

😎Jupiter (easy - right of the moon)
👍Venus (bright on the W horizon)
👌Saturn (trickier - need to know where to look)
🤷‍♀️Mercury (in hiding)
🙅‍♀️Neptune and Uranus (needs 🔭)
📷 @planetariumbochum.bsky.social

Two people on a dark stage wearing black with microphones in the middle of a stand up show. Catherine has her trademark red heals on, as always. Joe is trying to compete with his red trainers but isn't nearly as classy.

Reminiscing today on our old stand-up show & @joezuntz.bsky.social's uncannily prophetic joke

"her main duty is to fight the Astronomer Royal for England. And fortunately he's 80, so one quick smack with an 18 inch telescope & down he goes"😇

AR🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 v New AR🇬🇧 STFC CEO Westminster: 4th Mar

And we're off! My most favourite telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory, has turned on its public alert stream and boy, were there a lot of changes in the Universe last night. More coming: ~7 million a night 😮: exploding stars, belching black holes, asteroids cruising through the solar system. 🤗🔭🧪

ESA Space Safety Fleet ESA Space Safety Fleet

At ESA’s 2025 Ministerial Conference, the Space Safety Programme received significant support for its mission to predict, detect and mitigate space hazards, and to build towards a sustainable future in orbit. This is what we’re working on 👇

www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

An image labeled “SN 2025pht in NGC 1637, Hubble WFC3 2024 + Webb NIRCam 2024”. The majority of the image shows a face-on spiral galaxy speckled with myriad blue and red stars. The yellowish core of the galaxy forms a fuzzy oval tilted to the upper right. About halfway from the core to the edge of the image at about 4 o’clock, a small region is outlined with a white box. A shaded, nearly transparent white triangle extends to a pullout at upper right labeled “before explosion”, with short lines forming a crosshair that points to a red star at the center. Below this are three more square images, all with crosshairs at the same location. 1) Hubble August 2024, with nothing visible in the crosshairs, 2) Webb October 2024, with a red star in the crosshairs, 3) Hubble July 2025, with a blue supernova in the crosshairs.

We've long waited for a star to explode as a supernova in a galaxy that Webb had already observed.

In June 2025 such a supernova was detected in NGC 1637. A look back at Webb observations of the galaxy enabled astronomers the track down the star that went bang 💥 esawebb.org/news/weic2604/

🔭 🧪

Great thread!

YouTube video by Swimace Pancake Day - Maid Marian

🎵It’s pancake day
Yes it’s pancake day
Yes it’s p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pancake day🎵

Happy Tony Robinson Day, to all who celebrate!

youtu.be/gj_aHCpZl4k

It makes me feel old but BONESMASHMAXXED is out there. Learnt last week this means hitting your face with a hammer to somehow improve your jawline! I’m not sure I want to decode the rest least my head 🤯

STP Guy has joined bluesky!

@mark-nicol.bsky.social the paper I was just talking about.

Let me recommend grabbing a cup of tea & reading this really thoughtful piece from the inimitable @hogg.bsky.social on moderating AI/LLM use in astrophysics. 🔭

"the real question we face is not ... how we do astrophysics. It is the question of why we do astrophysics."

📖: arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10181

James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam view of deep space showing hundreds of distant galaxies in different shapes and colors against black. A white zoom box in the center-right highlights a tiny faint red dot labeled GRB 250314A—the gamma-ray burst source and its very distant host galaxy.

🧵1/9
Fascinating stuff— #JWST has spotted the oldest supernova ever confirmed.

It exploded when the #universe was just ~730 Myr old (~5% of its current age).

The whole thing began with a very bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 250314A.🔭 🧪

➡️ science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

#space #astronomy #science

a big scaffolding construct with snow on it and it's very very steep

a big hill in gloucestershire that is also very very steep and people chase cheese down it.

fun fact: the big air snowboarding ramp at the winter olympics is only 5° steeper than the cheese rolling hill.

Comic. [Person with ponytail pointing to diagram on wall as she talks to two other people, one with short hair.] PERSON 1: The high carbon content of the skeleton indicates that the individual lived less than 12.6 billion years ago, after the first round of stellar nucleosynthesis. [caption] Cosmologist carbon dating

Carbon Dating

xkcd.com/3205/

@ericlagadec.bsky.social

Why curling rocks come from just two spots on Earth The rocks used in the Olympic sport of curling come from one island in Scotland and one quarry in Wales. What makes them so special?

Had a blast speaking to curler and geologist Derek Leung about the geology of curling rocks. 🥌 🧪

Excellent news.

Update on the post below: in a letter sent to Chile's Environmental Assessment Service on 6 February, AES Andes requested the withdrawal of INNA from evaluation.

This formally confirms that INNA is not going ahead.

🔭 🧪

Ad for the ESA Graduate Trainee Programme 2026. A person is standing in the middle of a road looking at a meteor in the sky. The person has a backpack and holds a mobile phone in the hand. The landscape looks desert-like. The Milky Way band is visible across the sky. An ESA logo is placed on the upper right-hand corner, whereas on the lower right-hand corner the name of the agency is written: European Space Agency.

The 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee positions are waiting for your applications!

Step into a unique role where you’ll contribute to inspiring space missions and work alongside leading professionals from across Europe.

Discover the available positions 👉 jobs.esa.int

#ESArecruits 🔭 🧪