Hannah Earnshaw

Graduate Center Astrophysicists Find Black Hole Flare Is Biggest and Most Distant Seen The flare, co-discovered by scientists at CUNY and Caltech, may be the result of a mega black-hole meal.

What happens when a supermassive black hole takes a bite of a giant star?

It glows brighter than 10 trillion suns.

Profs. @saavikford.bsky.social and @bmckastro.bsky.social helped uncover this mind-bending feast in Nature Astronomy

It's Beetlejuice!!

(Uh oh. Someone just showed up. Gotta go! Happy Halloween!)

If we look at a nearby star-forming galaxy, that's like having thousands of Betelgeuse signals, all added together, allowing us to put even stronger limits on axion properties. If axions really are dark matter, we are slowly but surely closing in on their nature!

Betelgeuse is much bigger and hotter than the Sun, so searching for axion X-ray signals there allows us to put stronger constraints on the possible properties of axions, since we don't detect them from there either. But can we do a bigger experiment than that?

The production and decay of axions would produce a faint excess X-ray signal from the Sun, so observing the Sun allows us to put limits on how large and interactive an axion must be, if it exists. But in order to improve those limits, we need to find a bigger star. Like, say, Betelgeuse!

The centers of stars like our Sun are extremely hot environments which may produce axions, a hypothesized tiny, unimaginably light particle that is a candidate for dark matter AND might solve the matter/anti-matter asymmetry problem in particle physics, so there's lots of interest in finding them!

Composite image of the Sun including high-energy X-ray data from NuSTAR (blue); low-energy X-ray data from Hinode (green); and ultraviolet data from Solar Dynamics Observatory (red). The centers of stars like or even bigger than our Sun are unimaginably hot environments that may hold the key to detecting dark matter.

Particle Physics in Space: In Search of the Elusive Axion! New article up on the NuSTAR website about how we can use our astrophysics mission to do particle physics too, and hunt for dark matter! 🔭🧪
nustar.caltech.edu/news/nustar2...

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset.
In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia.
In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

Actual good news about a NASA science mission! 🔭

A photo of the Very Large Array showing the central ~11 radio dishes of the array pointed into the sky.

Off on vacation for a birthday road trip to New Mexico! Visited the VLA yesterday. Nice to pretend to be Jodie Foster in Contact for a minute.

‘There is nothing to buy’: Gaza’s descent into mass starvation Israel’s offensive and aid curbs tip enclave of 2.1mn Palestinians into famine

‘There is nothing to buy’: Gaza’s descent into mass starvation www.ft.com/content/e5d7...

We are excited to announce the discovery of #GW231123, a gravitational-wave signal from the merger of two high-mass black holes to form one about 190–265 times the mass of our Sun

ligo.org/ligo-virgo-k...

#O4IsHere 🔭🧪☄️

Indeed! In fact, this is why I like a model of environmental stewardship - if human feet are on Mars, affecting the Martian environment is inevitable, which calls for an active mode of care for the environment as opposed to passively trying to avoid impact, which would be doomed to failure.

I gave a talk about planetary stewardship at the Mars Society Convention a few years ago, and the intrinsic value of the abiotic Martian landscape was something I very briefly touched on - it's nice to see stuff like that get unpacked in a much more detailed way than I could do.

"Take the perspective ‘Mars is a failed Earth’. What if, instead, we took the view that Mars didn’t fail at becoming Earth, but, succeeded at becoming Mars? This latter view means that we would recognize the planet’s morally relevant attributes and respect it on its own terms." - I love this.

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

Photograph of OP in Balboa Park with a scarlet macaw perched on one arm, and another perched on their head. The one perched on their head has taken interest in their hat and is chewing on it a little. OP is delighted by this development.

Made some friends today

Just for everyone who sees this? This is exactly the level of rigor and dedication NYT has practiced in regards to its entire body of work on trans kids, affirmative action, and progressive policies. this is what they've always been. They just fluked up where everyone could see it this time.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Ok I know everything is terrible, but… there is still a very large & beautiful universe out there, & today we have access to a new gorgeous dataset from the Rubin Observatory.

The images are so large and detailed, you’d need a basketball court covered in ultra HD TVs to see the actual detail in the

Sometimes, astronomers have coherent and intelligent things to say about images of space and what they have to teach us. And sometimes we just have to go SPACE IS SO BIG AND AMAZING AAAAAAA

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

I love Mars, but we do not get there on the back of destroying everything else. We cannot and must not.

We All Need to Be Talking About the Murder of Jonathan Joss This Pride and Beyond The actor, who was Comanche and White Mountain Apache, was shot in a targeted hate crime while protecting his husband.

Wrote this piece for Harpers Bazaar about the life, legacy, and hate-induced murder of Jonathan Joss through the eyes of being a Two-Spirit Native person this Pride.

I hope you take a read. For Him. For all of us. 🪶

Stylized promotional artwork for the NASA NuSTAR X-ray space telescope, showing gas getting pulled from a star onto an accretion disk around a black hole, in a stained-glass art style.

Thirteen years ago today, the NuSTAR X-ray space telescope was launched, and has been pushing the boundaries of discovery in high-energy astrophysics ever since! See some cool artwork and learn about some of the key science areas that NuSTAR helps us study here: nustar.caltech.edu/page/nustar-... 🔭🧪

If that’s what they do to a US Senator with a question, imagine what they do to farm workers, day laborers, cooks, and the other nonviolent immigrants they are targeting in California and across the country. Or any American that dares to speak up.

I will not stop fighting to demand accountability.

Reporter: How did the Israelis treat you, we saw them giving sandwiches? Greta Thunberg: They probably have posted lots of PR stunts, they did an illegal act by kidnapping us in international waters but that’s not the real story here. The real story is the genocide in Gaza and systematic starvation. Reporter: Are you worried about the others? Greta: Yes…I’m calling for everyone who can to mobilize to demand their immediate release and, of course, to demand not only humanitarian aid being let into Gaza but also a ceasefire and most importantly an end to the occupation, an end to the systemic oppression and violence that Palestinians are facing on an everyday basis. Reporter: “Why do you think so many countries and governments around the world are just ignoring what’s happening in Gaza?” Greta Thunberg: “Because of racism.”

This is how.

Greta Thunberg spits fire and gives you the only media training you may ever need.

Very near to where I live. I'm out of town today, but very proud of my neighbours for kicking ICE out of the neighbourhood.

This picture gave me psychic damage

Scientists at Loughborough University create 'world's smallest violin' The violin is smaller than a human hair and has "laid the groundwork" for future research.

Well this couldn’t have come at a better time www.bbc.com/news/article...