Notices by CosmicRami (cosmicrami@aus.social)

Just saw this post on US Senator Cory Booker's Instagram account and honestly .... I reckon a big portion of the world is thinking the same thing right now.

C'mon America - please do the right thing!

Whoa! 🚀💥

Starship's explosion put a 1-hour hole in the ionosphere.

GPS data (multi-frequency) tells us about the total electron content (TEC) in the ionosphere (varies naturally). But the shock wave from this explosion caused a temporal depletion of TEC, as measured from 2500 ground stations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02841-4

This adds to the growing need for a better understanding of rockets' impacts in the high atmosphere. We don't have the modelling yet, and more and more rockets are going up each year.

Read the paper findings here: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109284

#Rockets #SpaceX #Starship #Astrodon #Ionosphere

I come from a business / digital background, so digital accessibility has always been big on my radar. When I started in science a few years back, I was very surprised to see that arXiv - a service that allows scientists to put their pre-prints (papers before peer review) was not accessible.

This meant that all science papers that were open access (away from journal subscriptions) were only available as PDFs - which means people with digital accessibility needs could not access them.

Access to science should be open to everyone (the pandemic showed us how important this is), and whilst there is a need for papers to undergo the formal peer-review process, that does not mean we can't adhere to global digital accessibility standards.

So, I am extremely glad to see that arXiv is now moving toward digital accessibility, with its second accessibility forum in Sept. 2024. They've also been moving to make papers in HTML format (instead of PDFs only) which adheres to these standards.

If you are interested in accessibility and science, you might consider attending this forum. It's free to all and only requires remote participation.

https://accessibility2024.arxiv.org/index.html

#science #accessibility #digital #astrodon #arxiv

Wooooaaahhhh!

The new JWST image of a small bit of the Horsehead Nebula is INCREDIBLE.

To give you a sense of scale here, here’s an image of the nebula from my backyard. That small white box … that’s the JWST field of view! 🤯🤯🤯

Look at ALL those galaxies, all in that tiny white box.

JWST image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Misselt and A. Abergel. [updated]

Dodgy image with white boxes is my own.

#JWST #SpaceTelescope #HorseheadNebula #Astronomy #Galaxies #Astrodon

OTD in 2020, Jupiter & Saturn came into conjunction (closest since 1643). MeerKAT (radio interferometer in South Africa) also turned its gaze towards the planets to observe their radio emissions.

They serendipitously discovered a pulsar in the background!

Here in the first inset, you can see Jupiter (which is a bright radio source in our sky), as well as Saturn (annotated 'S' - note that it is not as bright a radio source as Jupiter) and the pulsar (annoyed 'P' which stands for pulsar with anomalous refraction recurring on odd timescales - PARROT).

Also (last two insets), can we all appreciate how incredible Jupiter looks in radio with MeerKAT 𝐵-field vectors overplotted? Radiation belts FTW!

Oh, and those other sources - they aren't stars ... they are all supermassive black holes in distant galaxies in the background! (look at those jets!)

📸 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12165

#Planets #SolarSystem #RadioAstronomy #Astrodon

The fastest spinning object ever measured is a millisecond pulsar, rotating at ~24% the speed of light.

A new study says that with SKA, we should find a handful more of these that could be spinning slightly faster. But there are unlikely any sub-millisecond pulsars.

There are numerous reasons / theories as to why there is an upper limit for pulsars spinning at higher frequencies, for example, the breakup velocity (they are very well held together!) and the spin-down induced by gravitational radiation.

This science tells us about matter under these extreme conditions!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12185

#Pulsars #RadioAstronomy #Astrophysics #NuclearPhysics #Astrodon

Moaaar photos I took during our radio school trip to the Australian Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) last week.

📡📡📡📡📡

How many kangaroos can you spot? 🦘

(note - last image is a night shot!)

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Telescopes #Australia #Narrabri

Just arrived in Narrabri to visit the Compact Array this week!

Big sky land, and dark skies … I can’t way to see the Milky Way again, away from the city lights!

Then doing some radio astronomy learning with these magnificent giants ….

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy

The atmosphere is a (wonderful) fluid.

Also …. Home.

Wowowow @markmccaughrean !!!

EXPLOSION FINGERS?!?!?!?

JWST’s new images from Orion Nebula are spectacular! Look at this structure 🥹🤩😱

📸 JWST / ESA / NASA / CSA / M. McCaughrean / S. Pearson

#JWST #Astrodon #OrionNebula #Astronomy

Friends, tomorrow is Wear It Purple day - an annual day we wear purple to acknowledge, support & celebrate young LGBTIQA+ people.

It won't change the world, but it does send a signal to young LGBTIQA+ folks that we see them!

Wear something purple + share your pics across your socials to spread support. Would love to see you in it, so tag me if you do this!

Pass it on!

🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️

Yesterday I gave my first PhD talk at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Science Meeting on my fav millisecond pulsar - PSR J1713+0747.

The pulsar that threw a tantrum!

Millisecond pulsars are used in pulsar timing arrays as they’re considered stable rotators over the long term. That is vote to helping us search for gravitational wave backgrounds - the big news that we announced last week.

But this very well know millisecond pulsar decided to undergo a massive magnetospheric reconfiguration in 2021 - only the second millisecond pulsar that we know off to exhibit this strange behavior!

In my PhD I will be exploring to see why this happened and if other millisecond pulsars might be doing this on a smaller scale. Maybe they’re not so stable after all … ask me again in three years!

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Astrophysics #Pulsars #PulsarTiming #GravitationalWaves

🚨BIG SCIENCE NEWS 🚨

And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!

Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!

We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!

I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia

This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!

Check it out here: https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/australian-scientists-help-uncover-cosmic-gravitational-rumblings

📸 Shanika Galaudage

#Astrodon #Astrophysics #RadioAstronomy #GravitationalWaves #Science #Pulsars