Anke Ardern-Arentsen

I’m sure this does very little to assuage the concerns of people reliant on STFC funding, quite the opposite in fact.

#astro

I've been thinking - since these are likely CEMP-s stars, which are thought to receive carbon from an AGB binary companion at some point during their life, their presence (although cool that we found them) doesn't say much about early chemical evolution - just that there are binaries!

Three individuals observing a telescope at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. A text overlay reads: 'Are you looking for an astronomy internship at Cambridge?'

Undergraduates: Curious about a career in astronomy? 🔭

Take your first step with @cambridgeastro.bsky.social’s Summer Internship Programme and gain 8 weeks of research experience.

Applications from underrepresented groups in astronomy are encouraged.

Apply by 27 February 👇
https://bit.ly/4qYR0LD

Sky projection of the proto catalogues after applied magnitude cuts (see Section 3) in equatorial coordinates, constituting the superset from which the northern and southern WEAVE-TwiLight fields are derived. Red stars are part of the PLATO Long-duration Observation Phase (LOP) fields (V. Nascimbeni et al. 2022, 2025). Black circles and diamonds signify known exoplanet hosts and candidates, respectively. For orientation the Kepler FOV is overlaid in dark blue.

Published in #RASTI RAS Techniques & Instruments: "The WEAVE-TwiLight-Survey: expanding WEAVE’s reach to bright and low-surface-density targets with a novel observing mode", Hajnik et al. This is Fig. 2: read the paper at academic.oup.com/rasti/articl... @royalastrosoc.bsky.social @academic.oup.com

The WEAVE-TwiLight-Survey: Expanding WEAVE's Reach to Bright and Low-Surface-Density Targets with a Novel Observing Mode Current-day multi-object spectroscopic surveys are often limited in their ability to observe bright stars due to their low surface densities, resulting in increased observational overheads and reduced...

Congrats to PhD student Thomas Hajnik for getting his first PhD paper out, which is also one of the first WEAVE papers! Thomas has been designing and testing a new observing mode for WEAVE, cleverly superimposing multiple field configurations to observe more efficiently ✨🔭

arxiv.org/abs/2511.21184

Still took them 30 years though. Sad.

I’ve recently been annoyed by this for bike lights as well! Flashing bike lights are a hazard too but people seem to like using them…

Before being locked in a basement at the TNG offices for two days of WEAVE Science Processing & Analysis meeting (my first as part of the CASU team!), I managed to check out the southernmost tip of La Palma 🌋

The emergence of globular clusters and globular-cluster-like dwarfs - Nature The results from a state-of-the-art suite of hydrodynamical cosmological zoom-in simulations show how globular clusters naturally emerge in the Standard Cosmology and also reveal the existence of a ne...

Big news! @astroeth.bsky.social has his Nature paper on the Emergence of Globular Clusters out today! His simulations have globulars forming naturally, as well as some cool globular cluster like dwarfs! Check it out! 🔭🧪☄️

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

I think it stopped after 15 iterations 😅

The Andromeda Galaxy is shown just right of center, while some unusual blue arcs appear to its left. Please see the explanation for more detailed information.

🔭 Blue Arcs Toward Andromeda

Image Credit & Copyright: Ogle et al.

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25080...

UK gets first female Astronomer Royal in 350 years Prof Michele Dougherty is the first woman to be appointed to the influential post.

Big day for the matriarchy! 🥳 Huge congrats to the awesome Prof. Doughtery, lead on the Jupiter-bound ESA JUICE mission & STFC Exec Chair.

If anyone's confused on the astro royal hierarchy: Michele and I are the astro equivalents of 🇬🇧Westminster and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Holyrood 🤗

ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 👩‍🔬🔭🧪

Our sister institute at Durham, the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, are advertising for a five year lectureship position 🔭☄️
Advertisement is here, have a look and come join us in pretty Durham: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...
#astrosci

Hanyuan Zhang.

Hanyuan Zhang won for the paper: "Kinematics and dynamics of the Galactic bar revealed by Gaia long-period variables" by Hanyuan Zhang, Vasily Belokurov, N Wyn Evans, Sarah G Kane, and Jason L Sanders.
academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

Predicting metallicities and carbon abundances from Gaia XP spectra for (carbon-enhanced) metal-poor stars ABSTRACT. Carbon-rich (C-rich) stars can be found at all metallicities and evolutionary stages. They are often the result of mass transfer from a companion

At NAM 2025 in Durham @nam25-durham.bsky.social Anke Ardern-Arentsen is speaking on Carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars as probes for early chemical enrichment. Anke has published in #MNRAS: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

Ending bullying and precarity should be the Cambridge chancellor’s focus In recent decades, the post has been seen as purely ceremonial. But there is precedent and justification for a more interventionist role, says Wyn Evans

"Ending bullying and precarity should be Cambridge chancellor’s focus" says Prof Wyn Evans

"There is a need for University ombudsman to investigate cases of mismanagement or misconduct

I urge my fellow candidates for chancellor to back this call"

www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/endi...

Unsung observatory worker was UK’s first professional female astronomer, experts say Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy is trying to find a photo of Annie Walker, who died in 1940, to give her star billing

A story about Annie Walker, a 19th cent. astronomer who worked at the Cambridge Observatory, a forerunner to the IoA ... www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Congrats!! 🥳

Happy to announce that the line-detector.oca.eu website is now online!
It allows the user to select the stellar type, [M/H], λ- range, and resolving power and the page returns:
-purity of the line and minimum S/N required to detect it.
-interactive plot to identify the lines in the spectra

Picture of a TV screen showing the Sun through an H-alpha filter. Some nice solar prominences can be seen on the upper right

Nice view of the Sun 🌞 today from @cambridgeastro.bsky.social - thanks to Robin Catchpole 🔭

Wyn Evans of 21 Group is standing

If we can put together an alliance of everyone who is left out of decision-making in our universities, we can bring about real change

In universities, power is controlled by a tiny elite

Let's make this election about the principle of academic self-governance

Aww! Ik heb zo’n geluk gehad met haar als PhD supervisor! 😊

The 2025 Gruber Cosmology Prize has been awarded to Professor Max Pettini (IoA) and Professor Ryan Cooke (who is currently faculty at Durham, and was an IoA PhD student 2008-2011). www.ast.cam.ac.uk/news/2025-gr...

A view of Nice city and the Mediterranean sea, framed by a window inside the Observatory library. There are clouds in the sky and some raindrops on the window, but the view is amazing.

View of Nice by night, with many city lights below and still some sunset colours in the sky. Taken from Nice observatory, near the big dome (not visible)

Such a good view for a meeting room, and the view at the dinner was amazing too 😍 @ Pristine collaboration meeting, Nice Observatory @obscoteazur.bsky.social

so pretty! Is that in Cambridge?

In person voting for Chancellorship of Cambridge will break for University's candidate

If you did degree at Cambridge, you can vote online but must register beforehand

Deadline to register for online voting is 2 May

Act now

Please repost to ensure wide electorate

www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-un...

Recommend going through your spam folder after an academic rejection: "The paper with the title (...) has left a deep impression on us", "We believe your insights would be highly valuable to our readership", "I understand that you are an outstanding researcher" ✨

Deadline is tomorrow!

This seems like a valuable use of the position of Chancellor of Cambridge University. I have nominated Wyn Evans and encourage anyone else eligible (anyone with a Masters or PhD from Cambridge) to do the same.

The image shows three spectra from top to bottom (metal-rich, very metal-poor and carbon-enhanced very metal-poor, respectively), with each wavelength visualised by a coloured vertical line. The axis goes from ~380-700 nanometers. The metal-rich star has more and stronger dark lines than the metal-poor star, corresponding to absorption features. The carbon-enhanced metal-poor star has massive absorption bands, corresponding to molecular carbon absorption.

For a recent outreach talk I created this visualisation of real stellar spectra (from the LAMOST survey) - showing a metal-rich, a very metal-poor, and a carbon-enhanced very metal-poor star with similar temperatures (~5000K). Look at those massive molecular carbon bands for the CEMP star! ✨🔭