Teagan Clarke

Our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run has now drawn to a close. We will be busy analysing data for a while to come—watch out for more discovery announcements.

We will be back next year observing.docs.ligo.org/plan/

An infographic created by @astronerdika titled “MIRROR, MIRROR, reflecting our LASER beam… what’s the LOUDEST signal gravitational wave we’ve seen?” explaining the gravitational-wave discovery GW250114 and how the observation confirms Hawking’s area law. The visual shows the mirrors in a gravitational-wave interferometer speaking about the loudest event they have seen. There are several illustrations as follows: 1. A simplified diagram of a laser interferometer. A red laser beam from a labeled “LASER source” hits a beam splitter, travels down two perpendicular arms, reflects off round mirrors, and recombines at a labeled “detector.” A label near the top-right mirror reads: “the DETECTOR, signal seen by LIGO Hanford & LIGO Livingston.”
 2. An illustration of a binary black hole merger, with two black circles spiraling inward. They are labeled ~34 solar masses and ~32 solar masses. Surrounding spiral lines represent gravitational waves. A nearby caption reads: “the SOURCE, Discovered in 2025, on January 14, at 08:22:03 UTC.” 3. A prominent speech bubble with white text on a purple background states: “GW250114 is the loudest & clearest signal we’ve seen!” A smaller note below reads: “as of January 2025.” 4. Another speech bubble reads: “AND we saw that Hawking was right too!” 5. Visual explanation of Hawking’s Area Law. Two small circles labeled “this BH” + “this BH” are shown to the left of a “<” symbol, pointing to a larger circle labeled “the surface area of the merged BH.” Below there is the explanatory sentence: “GW250114’s remnant event horizon area is larger than the sum of the individual areas.” 6. A section titled “the PAPERS” lists two arXiv references: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08054 and https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.08099 Note: This infographic plays off the classic line from Snow White, “Mirror, mirror on the wall…” Here, the “mirrors” are the ones inside the laser interferometer, reflecting light to detect passing gravitational waves.

Mirror, mirror, reflecting our [LASER] beam...
What is the loudest [gravitational wave] signal that we've seen?

It’s #GW250114!

(Yes, it’s been two weeks since it was announced, but I can still celebrate! 🎉 )

#EinsteinWasRight #HawkingWasRight
@ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social

A photo of me in a green vest holding a pink cake with yellow sprinkles that says "p h done". I have a big smile with a slightly anxious look in my eyes

Occupation: Student'nt

Thanks @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social for making me the delicious cake and taking this photo of me being equally excited and terrified 5 minutes after submitting my PhD 🥰🎂🧑‍🎓

Front page news! 📰 Monash PhD researcher Christian Adamcwicz leads new LVK results revealing the mysterious 40 M☉ gap in black hole populations. Exciting clues about how the universe’s heaviest stars live and die! #BlackHoles #LVK #Astrophysics www.theaustralian.com.au/science/grav...

New masses in the stellar graveyard plot, showing astronomical observations of black holes and neutron stars. The number of gravitational-wave observations of black holes is overwhelming. The plot is arranged to look nice, the horizontal axis has no meaning, but the vertical one shows masses. We have a significant range of masses from about 1 solar mass to over 200 solar masses for our largest merger remnant. New out today is a neutron star black hole binary GW230518_125908, as well as a lot of binary black holes.

Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today!

We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discoveries of black holes and neutron stars

📰 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082

🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #GWTC4

Congrats to everyone in the LVK collaboration who worked so hard to get these exciting results out 🤩🧪🔭

JWST slays with this bisexual lighting for the super fascinating bullet cluster 😍🌈

Welcome to a new era in astronomy and astrophysics ✨🔭🧪

Get ready to join us virtually for the reveal of Rubin's first images! #RubinFirstLook
🗓️ June 23, 2025
⌚️ 11am US EDT
🔗 ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream

Detector dashboard showing all five detectors happily in Observing status

The gang are all here! Today we resumed our fourth observing run with LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, Virgo, KAGRA and GEO all observing together!

You can check detector status live at online.ligo.org

☄️🔭🧪

NASA Needs Your Help! NASA is facing severe budget cuts that would cancel missions ready to be launched, put tens of thousands out of a job, and set science back decades. We need your help to ask congress to prevent these ...

Did you know NASA science is facing a 50% budget cut??? Please read this @astrobites.bsky.social post to learn more about it and what you can do astrobites.org/2025/04/15/h...

Publication day! With @sarinastro.bsky.social , Eric Howell, @plasky.bsky.social and Eric Thrane, we explore a hypothetical coincident neutron star-black hole merger and fast radio burst. We hope this work helps pave the way for future multimessenger detections! 🔭🧪⚛️
journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...

Live from the kestrel box: Season 2 is now streaming!

Our kestrel camera is back online – the first eggs have arrived. 🥚🥚 Drop by our kestrel couple 🦅 and watch the little family grow.
www.mpinat.mpg.de/kestrel-camera

#MPI_BioDiversum #KestrelCamera #LiveStream #Kestrels

Oh wow, this is *such* a cool concept - a 'game' procedurally generated from Wikipedia, in which you can literally traverse all of human knowledge and walk down rabbit holes

A poster for the economic blackout on February 28. It is a big red Jack rabbit on an aqua blue back ground. It says economic blackout in hand done black type. There are two black speech bubbles. One says “don’t buy stuff Friday February 28th. The other says we have power. Below it says No Amazon, Walmart, target, gas food, gas. Below that it says OK small business, use cash. Designed by Martha Rich.

I made this the other night while procrastinating, mainly because I thought all the posts about the blackout were boring. It feels like there is momentum bringing people together!

World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US power company AES Corporation, submitted a project for a massive industrial complex for environmental impact assessment. This complex threatens the pristine skies above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the darkest and clearest of any astronomical observatory in the world [1]. The industrial megaproject is planned to be located just 5 to 11 kilometres from telescopes at Paranal, which would cause irreparable damage to astronomical observations, in particular due to light pollution emitted throughout the project’s operational life. Relocating the complex would save one of Earth's last truly pristine dark skies.

The best dark sky in the world - the Atacama Desert in Chile, which hosts many @eso.org telescopes - is under threat from an industrial project. 🔭

Astronomers can sign a petition in favour of moving the planned industrial project: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

#February11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science #IDWGS. Meet some of our international #WomenInSTEM through #HumansOfLIGO

1/🧵

Exciting news! We’re thrilled to announce that tapir Yuna gave birth to a rare and endangered Malayan tapir calf Sunday night. The newborn, covered in distinctive white spots and stripes resembling a fuzzy walking watermelon, is only the second tapir born in our 120-year history.

A bright comet seen next to the telescopes of the ESO observatory in Chile

ESO has some fantastic images of comet C/2024 G3 from their observatory in Chile

🧪🔭

Credit for this one belongs to F. Millour/ESO

The most shocking part of this photo are the words that have not been painted over as yet.

They aren't even all "DEI" words. And yet, they are being wiped away.

A re-write of history's lessons, the removal of the things that build a functioning society, to please the Emperor.

Here is a highly recommended thread that summarizes what has happened in scientific landscape in the US since Trump's inauguration. It makes for dystopian reading ⬇️

As expected, the Trump team is already deleting climate info from government websites. In anticipation, our team at Urban Ocean Lab created a permanent archive of 100+ key resources and published a permanent archive: www.urbanoceanlab.org/resource-hub 👩🏽‍💻

Petro, in 2021: “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success.”

Diversity & Inclusion - NASA A diverse and inclusive workforce fueled by innovation and united in achieving mission success for NASA.

NASA working fast to remove any trace of EDI from their website...
www.nasa.gov/odeo/diversi...

we have a pypi pypi.org/project/SK8p...

The Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund

Link to a Disaster Relief fund to help the 200+ Caltech Community Members - including several LIGO collaboration members - who have lost their homes to the fires:
giving.caltech.edu/areas-to-sup...

please share and / or donate if you can!

Artists impression of a magnetar: a compact spherical star surrounded by twisted magnetic field lines and glowing plasma.

I am looking to hire a PhD student at Swinburne University to study the links between pulsars, magnetars and fast radio bursts!

If you or anyone you know may be interested, then please feel free to reach out to me via email.

#Astronomy #RadioAstronomy

astronomy.swin.edu.au/study/phdpro...

Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run Continuous gravitational waves (CWs) emission from neutron stars carries information about their internal structure and equation of state, and it can provide tests of General Relativity. We present a ...

The Earth-based gravitational wave detectors (LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA) looked for continuous GWs across 45 pulsars (which can be formed by tiny little mountains on their surface) but found no continuous GWs. Sadness.

[note - these are not the GWs we search for in pulsar timing]

arxiv.org/abs/2501.01495

An M dwarf star with the text: "I am not a toy. I am not a Christmas present. I am a 10 trillion year commitment"

Think twice before gifting someone an M dwarf this holiday season

Scientists, academics, researchers: We’re excited to share that @altmetric.com is now tracking mentions of your research on Bluesky! 🧪

Hot off the press paper co-lead by @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social - mapping the gravitational wave background across the sky 🤩🔭🧪⚛️