Carl Haster

Tips and resources for those who would be interested in pursuing an astro PhD outside this US and applying for programs this Fall, put together by Floor Broekgaarden, Ana Lam, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Deana Tanguay! 🔭 docs.google.com/document/u/0...

Red tomato that is bulging out in seven directions visible from this angle alone. A spherical orange tomato sits next to it being normcore

Look at this fucking tomato we ate for dinner. It's four dimensional. Hypercube ass tomato

Devastating cuts to humanities education. If even somewhat accurate, this is terrible news for the University of Chicago. And a bleak outlook for universities elsewhere.

The scariest prospect is if, as Ando says, leaders of the faculty are promoting this rather than resisting as much as they can.

I was quite impressed by a harsh Italian commentator on the radio. He simply said: China has won. It has far more highly trained people than the US, gets ever more patents - what saved the US was that so many wanted to be in the US doing their research. Trump is destroying that advantage.

Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants Researchers are alarmed that the move might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants.

There are a lot of details in yesterday's sweeping executive order, but the bottom line is that it gives political appointees immense power over scientific grants, which have until now been stewarded by career civil servants and experts.

My reporting:
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Restoring Gold Standard Science By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 7301 of title 5, United

And we must only do Gold Standard Research

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

At early times, the Universe was very homogeneous. Regions were at most ~1 part in 100,000 more dense or less dense than the average; that's it. Gravity amplified those differences, making huge overdensities (galaxies, galaxy clusters) and underdensities (voids). Social media acts in the same way.

As a physicist I can easily calculate time dilation from relativistic motion (time slows when you're moving fast) or proximity to a massive object (time slows in gravity) but I have yet to find a solution for emotional time dilation (the task takes five minutes to complete but six weeks to start) 🫠

For reference, the NSF letter for UCLA's suspensions is on the left, while the letter for Harvard's terminations is on the right.

A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage A new ProPublica data analysis adds to the mounting evidence that abortion bans have made the common experience of first-trimester miscarriage far more dangerous.

More women have nearly bled to death during miscarriage under Texas’ abortion ban.

Experts say the trend paints a troubling picture of the harms of unnecessary delays in care.

“This is striking,” one doctor said. “The trend is very clear.”

Japp!
Liknande inblick också från första gången jag körde en "amerikanskt stor" SUV, så kände jag mig mycket mer märkvärdig än annars. En känsla som jag i efterhand inte var så stolt över...

Också konceptet "att ha en klocka". Dels för att det är ett hjälpmedel som väldigt direkt kopplar ihop alla på jorden i ett gemensamt (och fixerat) referenssystem, och dels för att om man väljer att ställa sig utanför denna gemenskap nog inte kommer väldigt långt i dagens samhälle.

Att köra bil är som en lite snällare variant av "battle mech" från mången sci-fi 🙂

Det är ju också lite samma när man kör bil. Det är ju mindre "min kropp driver denna maskin", men för att kunna framföra en bil behöver man ju känna av var den är och hur stor den är, samt hur bilen förhåller sig till sin omgivning.

An elk muching on a tree outside the main building at the Aspen Center for Physics

A happy start for my stay @aspenphysics.bsky.social
Excited to learn and work on low-frequency Gravitational Wave science!

Picture taken from an airplane over the Grand canyon, at the top of the picture is a stream of clouds showing signs of a Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (a wavy pattern)

A nice Kelvin–Helmholtz instability over the Grand Canyon

For context: The coal industry employs about 40,000 people.

Trump And Miller Compel Colleges Not To Enroll International Students Trump officials are using rules, policies and agreements to compel and discourage U.S. universities from enrolling international students.

Wow. Had not realized that Columbia’s settlement with Trump admin included a commitment to decrease international student enrollment. In what way does this help “combat antisemitism,” which is supposedly the administration’s objective?
www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...

Text detailing how MSU isn’t accepting grad applications for astronomy on their website

Sign of the times- Michigan State, one of the biggest astronomy programs in the USA, is not accepting ANY applications for its graduate program this year 😖

🔭🧪🎢

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird.

(he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

An infographic titled "How BIG are the BLACK HOLES we find with GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?" by @astronerdika. The graphic displays a range of black hole masses detected via gravitational waves, categorized by their size in solar masses (mass of the Sun) and represented with playful cat-like black hole illustrations. The categories from left to right are: 1. "<5 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "smol" - Very small black hole illustration represented by a curled up black cat - Arrow pointing left: "THIS WAY TO NEUTRON STARS" - Example: "Big component of GW230529 (~3.6 times the mass of the Sun)" 2. "~10 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "basic" - Slightly larger black hole cat illustration - Caption: "LOTS OF BLACK HOLES" 3. "~35–45 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "hefty" - Bigger black hole cat illustration - Continues the idea of a populated range 4. ">60 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "chonky" - Large black hole cat illustration - Caption: "FORBIDDEN TERRITORY? (can these even be made from the collapse of star cores?!)" - Example: "Components of GW190521 (~85 + ~66 times the mass of the Sun)" 5. ">100 times the mass of the Sun" - Labeled "oh lawd" - Very large, curled-up black hole cat illustration - Arrow pointing right: "THIS WAY TO INTERMEDIATE MASS BLACK HOLES" - Example: "Components of GW231123 (~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun)" Below the categories is a stylized black curve representing the inferred population of black holes detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. It rises sharply in the "basic" range and falls off toward the "hefty" and "chonky" ranges, with a note reading: "this curve is an artistic representation of the black hole population inferred by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA." This infographic draws from the “Chonky Cat” meme.

Heard the latest news from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration? We detected the collision of the most massive pair of black holes so far: #GW231123 weighing in at ~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun!

So to celebrate, here’s a handy chart ✨

Just how chonky are these black holes? 🤔

I think some people have trouble seeing fascism as anything other than 1940s Germany.

But I think 'people going to a comic convention needing to have a plan in case the government's goons show up to disappear people' is a pretty good demonstration of what it can look like in 2025.

In this short film, @flatironinstitute.org researcher Lieke van Son reveals ways gravitational waves are part of our daily life. As part of our Symbiosis program, van Son and filmmaker Kyle Finnegan created "Who Cares About Gravitational Waves?": www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/23/w... #science

this is very cool but also contains the truest thing anyone has ever said

"I’m very thankful that I get to blow stuff up with giant lasers for discoveries. And that’s my job, you know."

Skulle inte bli överraskad att det blir nåt liknande här.

Både att folk som förlorar högspecialiserade jobb inte går att ersätta med vem som helst (och de som avskedas söker givetvis andra jobb än att vänta på en snällare president).
Plus att antalet forskarstuderande kommer dras ner markant.
Plus att det delas ut mindre anslag, så mindre forskning utförs.

1. Stereo image of Dr. Brian May from his website https://brianmay.com/. View crossed-eyed or by staring at infinity. May has created stereo images for NASA, ESA and JAXA for various asteroids and other celestial objects. 2. A pair of stereoscopic images of the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite, Selam, created using data collected by the L’LORRI camera on the NASA Lucy spacecraft in the minutes around closest approach on Nov. 1, 2023. To use this image pair to get a better sense of the 3D structure of the asteroids, either relax the axes of your eyes, as if staring through the screen to infinity (so that you are looking at the left image with your left eye and the right image with your right eye), or use a stereoscope. Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab for the original images/Brian May/Claudia Manzoni for stereo processing of the images 

Happy Birthday to Sir Brian May, born 19 July 1947, virtuoso musician and astrophysicist with a PhD from Imperial College London 😎.

Dr. May has collaborated with NASA on the New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx and DART missions, with JAXA on Hayabusa2 and with ESA on the Hera mission.

🎸🪐 🔭
#planetSci

This guy has got game! Haven't seen this since early Obama.

So far, Columbia University has had 809 grants frozen because of Trump's attack on universities, leading to 180 layoffs.