Jessica Lu

#SaveNASA

White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act “We would be turning off some fabulous missions that are doing extremely well.”…

Why oh why? arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

It is being implemented as we speak. Voluntary at first (incentivized retirements/early leave) and later, layoffs. If we do nothing, we will lose half of NASA Goddard (and most likely all of NASA).

NASA begins push to slash workforce with more staff buyouts, early retirements as budget cuts loom NASA employees have until July 25 to decide if they'll stay or go.

NASA Goddard is pushing through a 48% staff reduction!!! This could impact the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and many other future Astro missions. News coverage seems not sensational enough. Are we really going to let NASA (as we know it) die quietly? www.space.com/space-explor...

Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.

Also of note/horror: this budget makes the 30M downselect explicit (GMT, not TMT) --

MPS budget

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

A screenshot of the number of people involved in NSF activities being reduced from 330,100 to 90,000.

TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.

A huge subsystem of the Roman observatory in a thermal vacuum chamber. Seven technicians stand of the side of the observatory, as the bottom of the chamber.

A key portion of #NASARoman has cleared a thermal vacuum test. Tt was subjected to the hot and cold temperatures it will experience in space: go.nasa.gov/43cwDQL 🔭 🧪

Rapid Microlensing Classification: A Lonely SOBH Story Astrobites reports on how we can use simulations of stellar populations to rapidly estimate the identity of the lensing object in a microlensing event.

aasnova.org/2025/04/02/r...

National Science Foundation Fires 168 Workers as Federal Purge Continues Firings at the NSF included permanent employees who had already completed their one-year probationary period, as well as at-will workers.

My heart goes out to the good people who had to endure this at the NSF today www.wired.com/story/nation... 🧪

Were you fired by President Trump? | House Committee on Science, Space and Technology The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

For you foodies out there, I highly recommend this conference tradition. Great food and meet new people!

Interested in black holes or the Galactic Center check out Thursday sessions at #AAS243 by MovingUniverse Lab grads, Natasha Abrams (440.05) and Anna Pusack (420.05). Lots of new results!

Friend of mine owns and spouse is chef at Gris-Gris: grisgrisnola.com (not in French Quarter).

Galactic black hole population.

First author, Casey Lam, put together the known population of Milky Way black holes:

Update on the gravitational lensing black hole, OB110462. It is definitely a black hole and our revised photometric and astrometric analysis gives a mass of 6 +/- 1 Sun. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03302

ESA’s Euclid mission has reached L2 where JWST and Gaia are waiting 💕 https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/Follow_Euclid_s_first_months_in_space

AstroTechers working on grating design principles and inclusive teamwork skills today at #AstroTech!

The young stars orbiting the supermassive black hole probably formed in a complex dynamical structure... not just a vanilla "ball of gas".

And the structure looks asymmetric. That means there are more stars on one side of the orbital plane than another. This makes us think it is not a plane so much as a stream of stars perhaps recently disrupted.

This Plane 2 structure might be associated with some stars in the IRS 13 clump of stars:

We have known for sometime that the young stars' orbits aren't randomly distributed. There is a preferred disk of young stars that contains 20-30% of the young stars in the region. But, in our new paper, we have found a second structure!

In Jia, Xu, Lu, et al. we present a study of the dynamics of young stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acb939/pdf

Hello BlueSky! I'm an astronomy professor at UC Berkeley working on black holes, star clusters, the Galactic center, and the instruments and telescopes needed to study them. As a further introduction, I'll post a brief thread on my research group's latest published paper.