Carl Haster

True!
Hence, my second favourite black hole is the less massive component of GW241011!

Depends how well you will justify picking another one 😉

International conventions should not be held in the U.S.

For now, the more massive component of the GW241011 binary ⚫️

Hubble Space Telescope in space orbiting above Earth’s limb. Words to the right read: Hubble Notebook Update.

Improvements ahead! A team at STScI recently launched a full suite of enhanced Jupyter Notebooks for scientific analyses with Hubble. The upgrades improve the functionality of the repository, as well as the DrizzlePac software suite: https://bit.ly/3XJAXVh 🔭 🧪 ☄️

Heartbreaking. The University of Nebraska will terminate its entire Earth science department.

One of the country's most successful and respected geology & climate programs: gone.

When ideologues & politicians are threatened by the very act of studying climate change, I wonder: who of us is next?

For the 1st time ever, 8 spacecraft are docked to the International Space Station It's the first time all the spacecraft docking ports on the current configuration of the ISS have been occupied.

It's easy to forget we live in a future with a fully operating space station with multiple docking ports for various spacecraft.

www.space.com/space-explor...

A black and white comic of the author talkin to themselves, they say “ahhh a new year, a fresh start”. They then look at the calendar in shock seeing it’s already May. “HUH? MAY??” they say. Then they say “that’s fine, I have the whole summer ahead of me!” They look at the calendar, now it’s September. “WHAT?! HUH?” They hold their head in their hands, despairing. “No, no, it’s okay, there’s still time” they look at the calendar which now says December and shriek “STOP!!” At it

Happy old year

A skill that might actually be quite useful while on the ISS!

Also featured is the Spherical Cow by @minouette.bsky.social 🐄

The fun office corner 😊

A really nice Astrobites article about our recent discovery of two really interesting black hole binaries observed with @ligo.org and @egovirgo.bsky.social!

Are you fucking kidding me it’s like we are living in a cartoon

and it makes one corner of my office significantly more fun 🙂

It is indeed a very pretty (and scientifically accurate) star!

Game for cool people

Explore the Redesigned Learn.Astropy.org A New Way to Learn Astronomy with Python

Have you ever wanted @astropy.org tutorials on:
– spectroscopic data reduction from a raw FITS image,
– computing galactic orbits from Gaia measurements,
– cross-matching astronomical catalogs?

Check out the redesigned learn.astropy.org! Announcement from @numfocus.bsky.social below. 🧪🔭 #astrocode

Infographic about GW241011 and GW241110 GW241011's source contained black holes about 13 and 8 times the mass of our Sun. The spin of the bigger black hole is high and bear aligned with the orbit. GW241110's source contained black holes about 17 and 8 times the mass of our Sun. The spin of the larger black hole is high and near anti-aligned with the orbit. Credit: Shanika Galaudage/Northwestern University/Adler Planetarium

We are pleased to announce our discovery of #GW241011 and #GW241110

Both come from binary black holes where one black hole is much larger than the other. The larger black holes have large spin. Could these black holes have formed in a previous merger?

ligo.org/science-summ...

#O4IsHere 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

The Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program: A Reanalysis Of Cosmology Results And Evidence For Evolving Dark Energy With An Updated Type Ia Supernova Calibration We present improved cosmological constraints from a re-analysis of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) 5-year sample of Type Ia supernovae (DES-SN5YR). This re-analysis includes an improved photometric cross...

A little less than a year ago, a large team of cosmologists reported evidence that dark energy (which drives the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe) evolves over time. This made a huge splash but has also been viewed with healthy skepticism. Today they report that evidence has weakened. 🧪

GWTC-4.0 Introduction & Open Data Webinar 13 November 2025 Webinar live from 15:00 UTC

Our next webinar will introduce our latest #GWTC4 release and the associated data (papers arxiv.org/abs/2508.18080 and arxiv.org/abs/2508.18079)

Tomorrow at 15:00 UTC, with the recording on YouTube after

Free registration wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

☄️🔭

Study: Pair of Distinct Black Hole Mergers Reveals Clues on How They Form and Evolve The mergers, measured one month apart in 2024 by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, advance scientific understanding of the nature of black hole formation and fundamental physics; offer evidence of "seco...

A universal mystery 🪐 Recently published research co-authored by UNLV astrophysicist Carl-Johan Haster gives insight into black holes and fundamental physics.

#UniversityResearch #Science #Physics #Astrophysics

www.unlv.edu/news/release...

We’re closer to solving dark matter thanks to these black holes!

OzGrav PhD student at ANU, Aswathi, was part of the analysis team of the GW241011+GW241110 special event paper. Here she explains how these events helped refine our understanding of dark matter.

youtube.com/shorts/wW4yp...

A really nice article in AAS Nova about our article that was published today!

It's been very fun/frustrating sitting on these results for the last couple of months 😜
So I'm happy they're out for the rest of the world to see!

Finally, I want to thank the amazing team I've had the privilege to work with over the last couple of months in preparing this paper!
I couldn't find a better group of people to work with, and explore the amazing astrophysical potential our observations provide 🙂

This precise spin measurements also allow us to do some pretty impressive tests of fundamental physics, in addition to the very informative astrophysical constraints.
Again, showing the amount GW observations will be able to help us understand our Universe better in so many different ways!

This is most evident in the very well measured spins of the more massive BH in our binaries.

These two binaries have some pretty exciting properties, with binary configurations nicely hinting towards a likely formation through *at least* a dynamical process, but also potentially with one of the Black Holes in our observed binaries being the remnant from a previous BBH merger!

I'm incredibly happy to share the amazing results we in the @ligo.org, @egovirgo.bsky.social, KAGRA collaborations have made public today.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

We are today announcing the observation of two new Binary Black Holes, GW241011 and GW241110.