Michael Zingale

US Astronomy Graduate Admissions, AY 2025-2026

Are you someone who is interested in astronomy graduate school? This is a list of many/most departments and their expectations for admissions this year. Please feel free to spread it far and wide. If you are doing admissions and you'd like to update your entry, reach out as per the form!

won't someone think of the electrons?!?!

UT Austin is hiring faculty in cosmology (Physics department), astronomy, and scientific machine learning (Oden Institute; 2 positions). Feel free to contact me for more details! 🧪🔭☄️

apply.interfolio.com/175261
aas.org/jobregister/...
apply.interfolio.com/174445
apply.interfolio.com/174449

also, are Physics programs doing the same? or is their funding more robust? (or at least they think it is?)

sad to hear. Keep us posted.

Ohio State astronomy is still waiting to see what happens with the federal funding landscape before deciding whether to proceed. With programs that are still TBD, I recommend waiting right now because *application fees do not get refunded if they decide to cancel after you have already paid*!!

Sad to see the University of Washington Astronomy Department has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. astro.washington.edu/graduate-adm...

that sounds about right.

Sometimes more -- depending on how much fun I am having with the material :)

There’s a crazy AHSOKA Season 2 theory going around that, if true, may be the wildest thing we’ve seen from Star Wars in years.

Details here: theholofiles.com/2025/10/07/t...

Surveying the State of Writing Education in Physics and Astronomy Writing is a critical skill for modern science, enabling collaboration, scientific discourse, public outreach, and more. Accordingly, it is important to consider how physicists and astronomers are tra...

Excellent piece by @briles34.bsky.social on writing in the discipline. It’s depressing that we think that theoretical physics expertise is not just more important but INFINITELY more important than writing to… *writing* PhD dissertations (on any subfield of astro, say). arxiv.org/abs/2510.03493

A plot of binding energy per nucleon, showing a curve that stars at 0 MeV at mass number 1 and increases steeply to > 8 MeV / nucleon in the iron-group and then slowly declines for heavy A

we show this plot of binding energy / nucleon a lot in Stars class, but ever wonder how to make it? Here's a notebook that uses pynucastro:

zingale.github.io/stars/notebo...

#astro

a plot of equipotentials in a binary star system, showing the Roche lobes and Lagrange points. The green color scheme makes it look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle...

I like my plot of equipotentials a lot, but I can never shake the fact that @sabinastro.bsky.social calls it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle plot...

zingale.github.io/stars/notebo...

python 3.14 seems much faster!

a chef in a kitchen with the words borg written on the bottom ALT: a chef in a kitchen with the words borg written on the bottom

Physics Nobel announcement tomorrow.

If you know and dislike a famous physicist, this is the day of the year to call them up in the middle of the night, wait 10 seconds, and then do you best Swedish Chef impression...

how much of the Riley text do you get through in one semester?

my computational notes are here, if they are helpful:
zingale.github.io/computationa...

I made it to level "Untitled23.ipynb"!!!

I heard you get an extra life at "Untitled32.ipynb" -- is that true?

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

when I was teaching intro level astro courses, we did multiple-choice + scantron. The trick was that the longest answer choice was always correct. :)

It just worked out that way, because I would be so careful in wording it to make it unambiguous

no, your report is overdue!

procrastihacking [verb]
the act of seeking out random code issues to fix rather than doing the work you are supposed to be doing.

Hey fluids friends, we're recruiting in my department this year!

seriously!?!?!?

the main use I've found for ChatGPT is replacing google for searching stackoverflow. My .emacs has never looked better ;)

Yep, ADS is very nice, but misses lots of interdisciplinary papers. I actually quite like Google scholar because it is much more complete.

This is not a drill people!!

Educational Program Coordinator II - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The program coordinator will maintain the planetarium, present live shows, and create new planetarium visualizations. In addition, this position will assist customers, assist in educa...

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

a room with a giantmonster logo on the bottom Alt: the bridge of the enterprise from Star Trek

am I doing this correctlly?

nope. Happens to me constants. The bsky app is very unstable.