Anshuman Acharya

The pub folks have excellent taste in music! 🥳

Congratulations! 😄

The German SKA community! I’m delighted to be joining it in a month or so. #SKAO2025

Two dish scrubs, of the Scrub Daddy brand, so they're both with smiley faces. One is new and looks fresh and is labelled as being a first year PhD, all full of hope and energy. The other is old and looks withered and has lost colour, and is labelled as being a final year PhD. But the old one is also still smiling!

Was swapping my dish scrub for a new one, and had this thought pop up:

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Career-Life Balance (CLB) Supplemental Funding Requests

Another funding opportunity is gone. NSF archived the the Career-Life Balance program which provided supplemental funding when researchers are on family leave.

The small strides we had made toward improving representation in science are being undone so fast.

new.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Caption reading as from the supervisor, who's saying "I'll introduce you to this potential collaborator, make a good impression!", and they few minutes later, the scene is of a derpy orange kitten lifted up in one hand, with it's tongue sticking out. The kitten is the PhD student!

Definitely thankful to my supervisor for doing this though. It helped build the courage to eventually approach people myself. 😁

The caption says "What's an effective way to respond to a harsh referee report?", and the attached picture is of Captain Holt from Brooklyn 99 showing and declaring, "Grenades!", which is what my response is to the question in the caption.

Sometimes you need to respond with a bang 😁

Some scientists do have superpowers after all! 😁

Old dude in flamboyant clothing represents my plots in the paper which were made ages ago. Tiger Woods dressed in black and white represents the text in my paper that seems to worsen with each iteration. Two golf balls near the flamboyant old dude are labelled as "underfull hbox" and "overfull hbox". Why are they labelled so? Nobody knows. It's a mystery of LaTeX that scientists have just accepted as a part of life.

Found an old meme of mine from Twitter, and realised that the alt text was a little Easter egg of its own. Proud of past me for this!

Calvin and Hobbes: “If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll be they’d live a lot differently.”

i think about this a lot

But that's possibly an idea for something I can do beyond my PhD, as the time has come to tie together all these projects into my PhD thesis. 😄

This leads to the need of finding ways to run high-resolution, large box simulations without having insane computational (and energy!) costs. At the very least, we want dark matter halo resolution (masses and positions) along with their merger trees.

For this, we look towards super-resolution!

Lastly, we tested the new Polar sims which allows us to vary astrophysics in our sims along with varying cosmologies. We find that we can have multiple viable models that explain multiwavelength EoR observables, indicating the need for broad parameter spaces: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXi...

We also wanted to improve the measure of the 21-cm signal power spectrum at large scales, without running large volume simulations. For this, we ran RHD sims using the Fixed & Paired initial conditions formalism and boosted effective volume by a factor of 3.5: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024MNRA...

applied it to real data even with older analysis pipelines in ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024MNRA....

Also, this was tested against mock SKA data in the Science Data Challenge 3a, and got the best possible results too by a significant lead (sdc3.skao.int/challenges/f...)!

Firstly, I talked about using ML to build templates of the 21-cm signal power spectrum, which can be used to extract the signal by removing foregrounds and noise from LOFAR (or any other radio interferometer) data. We tested this with mock datasets in ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024MNRA... and...

Thanks to @maxplanck.de, MPA and my supervisor for providing the support and funding for all of these exciting projects and the ability to showcase them in various places.

A collage of me giving talks of my PhD work at various places and some nice pictures of those places.

Wrapping up on a busy 2024! From @astroai.bsky.social to @scienceacademyswe.bsky.social, and from Cosmo21, Radio 2024 to CCA @flatironinstitute.org, it's been a busy year of presenting results ranging from EoR 21-cm signal extraction with ML, to large-scale simulations, to plans of super-resolution.

Pirates of the Caribbean meme YOU MUST BE THE WORST ASTROPHYSICIST I’VE HEARD OF BUT YOU HAVE HEARD OF ME

The vibe I exude to my bluesky followers

Something I tried to emphasize to the Schmidt Foundation a couple of years ago is that one of the ways to intervene in this pattern is for foundations that give out scicomm awards to provide academic winners with research funding so universities see there is fiscal value in supporting scicomm

fantastic piece discussing the evolving role of scholars/scientists
www.nationalacademies.org/news/2024/06...

I'll be talking about pretty much everything I've done during my PhD:

from implementing ML-based templates for the IGM 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization, to the development of new simulations, their needs, and current issues.

Also will discuss projects I hope to work on as a postdoc!

Heading off to New York for the "Cosmology and galaxy astrophysics with simulations and machine learning" happening at CCA at @flatironinstitute.org!

Lots of interesting science, and of course, Christmas festivities in the city to look forward to. 😁

Darth Vader representing the admin, saying "coffee prices will go up", while everyone at the institute is represented by Luke Skywalker screaming "nooooooooo"

An unfortunate event at any astro institute/department:

Regular Winnie the Pooh is labeled as "theorists" saying that the escape fraction is 10%. Then Winnie the Pooh with a tuxedo is labeled as "observers" saying that as it's a fraction, it should be 0.1. Then the third Winnie the Pooh has the tuxedo, but also a top hat and monocle, and is labeled as "me", saying that as it's a fraction it should be 1 by 10.

On a paper with both theorists and observers, I managed to annoy both!

f_esc here represents the "escape fraction", or the fraction of ionizing photons escaping out of galaxies and reaching the Intergalactic Medium.

I’ve seen some posts recently, about the value of basic research, in light of funding cuts and demands that research have immediate economic justification.

Let me collect some info here, in a thread, about why it’s a bad idea to attach those sorts of demands to funding. 🧵 🧪 ⚛️

Prompted by this and a need for distraction I Did Some Math. Turns out most extrasolar planets are quite cauliflower-compatible. A thread, with citations. And laboratory astrophysics. And footnotes.

A screen capture from Smosh's Ultimate Werewolf Gentlemen edition, with two guys dressed in top hats, suits and bowties look at each other smiling conspiratorially. One of them has a fake cigarette, while the other has a lollipop in hand. The caption reads: "PhDs when the two rival profs at the conference start fighting", because PhD students tend to find the drama entertaining.

With the final conference season of the year upon us in the next two weeks, I believe this is apt: