iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This change ends ~ 4 years of service at LANL and is not without mixed feelings. I will always look back fondly on my time in northern New Mexico and am grateful for the experiences and connections made there

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

News: we moved to New York! I’m excited to share that I am joining Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics as a research software engineer supporting MESA and broader software needs. Software is a pillar of sci. infrastructure and I am elated to continue to support it

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Words can’t express how happy we are with the event and with the venue everyone should get married now

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Traded code crashes for snowboard crashes

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Christmas Day is finally here, and that means two things: Lord of the Rings (extended) and a day full of hobbit meals

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Went to Michigan over thanksgiving and got to take a god honoring nap

Someone taking a nap outside in the Michigan winter

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

The postdoctoral job ad for the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Center for Theoretical Astrophysics is live! Come join us in beautiful northern New Mexico. aas.org/jobregister/...

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

What color is this cat, be as specific as possible

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

my aesthetic is Dover math and physics textbook art

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

on the opposite side i finally (re) found beamer. turns out they can look interesting after all. wouldn’t use anything else besides Libre office because fuck proprietary thought

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Did you know the high desert looks like this

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

In honor of Caroline Herschel, remembering one of my favorite poems: Planetarium, by Adrienne Rich (www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46568/...)

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

2024 was a wild one. lots of travel, applied to postdocs, finished my PhD, backpacked Isle Royale, started my fellowship at LANL, but saved the best for last: got engaged to the love of my life

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

They’re having a good one too (right side bed is new)

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Christmas (eve) tamales with chicken and hatch green chile tomatillo salsa

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Jam advent calendar (only a few days late to start)

Theoden from lord of the rings saying “so it begins”

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

finding out in 2019 that LIGO was using teamspeak as their official telecon platform

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Double paper day! In the first, led by Matthew Mumpower, we explore a new source of nucleosynthesis in long GRBs: conversion of protons to neutrons and pions via photons. In the second, led by MSU postdoc Jing Lu, we compute SN Ic spectra from neutrino driven explosion models

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 16/10/2024

Phoebus targets phenomena like core-collapse supernovae and accretion disk systems! It’s totally open source and we look forward to interactions with the broader community.

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 16/10/2024

Another paper day! We present our open source code Phoebus (PHifty One Ergs Blows Up a Star) : a simulation code for relativistic astrophysics implementing general relativistic neutrino radiation magnetohydrodynamics! arxiv.org/abs/2410.09146 github.com/lanl/phoebus

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Super excited to finally share that I’ve accepted a Metropolis computational physics postdoctoral fellowship at Los Alamos National Lab! Blessed to be able to continue blowing up stars. Mae and I are super fortunate to be able to continue our careers together in New Mexico.

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 14/02/2024

Been spending time on code verification tasks, and as usual, got myself distracted. Spent too much writing up Sedov-Taylor blast wave solutions (amongst others) and figured others might benefit github.com/AstroBarker/... Does a pretty good job ! (but some work for edge cases?)

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 28/01/2024

Making plots has had me thinking about colors, so I improved my mplcolors tool to produce color triads, tetrads, and split color complements, and set it up to be an importable package (PyPI coming.. eventually) github.com/AstroBarker/mp…

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Brandon Bright-Barker, PhD @astrobarker.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

when a grad student rewrites legacy code

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