iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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sanjana! @sanjanacurtis.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I think it’s cool that some people focus on curing disease and some people focus on understanding what animals are up to and some people think about our place in the universe and how things came to be the way they are. People are driven by curiosity and I promise you you don’t want it any other way

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Alexis Quintana @alexis-space.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

A new census of OB associations with Gaia! In this study, we took advantage of my OB stars map to find new OB associations within 1 kpc. The goal was to create a useful reference catalogue for this era, and to trace the star formation and structure of the local Milky Way. #stellarastro #galactic

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 09/12/2025

New paper led by Fabian Polnitzcky & with @sratzenboeck.bsky.social + @joaoalves.bsky.social: based on the ages of stars with infrared excess in Sco-Cen, it seems planet-forming disks last around twice as long as previous estimates suggest - giving twice as long for planets to form. 🔭☄️ #exoplanets

Their input source selection in the Sco-Cen region, showing stars with (blue) and without (orange) disks.

$The fraction of young stars with disks as a function of age, based on three different selection methods. All show that many stars appear to have disks to ages well beyond ~10 million years, with a median lifetime of ~5 million years!$

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 22/10/2025

Simulating accurate observations of star clusters is really annoying! So as a part of this paper, we open sourced all of the code we used to simulate them, and there's a Python notebook that explains how to do it right here: 🔭☄️ #galactic #astrocode

ocelot-docs.org

Simulate a cluster with ocelot - ocelot

A toolbox for working with observations of star clusters.

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Alexis Quintana @alexis-space.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

A great paper led by Josefa Großschedl has a appeared on arxiv this morning! A detailed study on the velocity dispersion of the subgroups of Sco-Cen, the nearest OB association. The expansion of the complex is driven by stellar feedback, engendering a sequential star formation process. #astronomy

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Luke Bones 🦴🦴 @lukemeister.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Gargantuan Gaia review by Michael Perryman "271 pages, 126 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Reports" arxiv.org/abs/2509.10883

Figure 16: Sky projections, in Galactic coordinates, showing various properties of the Gaia DR3 data release (see text for details).

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Stellar Origins 2025 @ Vienna @stellarorigins2025.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Just about a month until we kick off "Stellar Origins" in Vienna! 👀 Until then, we'll keep you updated here with news on the scientific program and some sneak peeks of what else we have planned for you! Stay tuned and tell your friends! #stellarorigins2025

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Alexis Quintana @alexis-space.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

An exciting paper has appeared today, led by Lily Kormann from the University of Vienna! With the extinction map from Edenhofer et al. (2024), they discovered seven local superclouds, only two of which, The Radcliffe Wave and The Split, were already known! #galactic arxiv.org/abs/2507.14883

arxiv.org

The Superclouds of the Local Milky Way

Recent 3D dust maps of the local Milky Way are revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun's Galactic neighborhood, bringing much-needed insight into the large-scale organization of the interstellar ...

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 24/06/2025

How many open clusters could be hiding at the edge of our galaxy? 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic Our new paper out today (A&A, accepted) pioneers a new way to test the completeness of cluster catalogues built with @esa.int's Gaia mission!

$The fraction of simulated clusters we recover (upper panel) compared against a dust map (lower panel.) Dust is clearly a major hindrance to seeing open clusters with Gaia.$ The detectability of young clusters (upper panel) and old clusters (lower panel) in the anticentre of our galaxy. Grey points show real clusters. It's clear that there's a huge void where we're not sensitive enough to say if there are more old clusters.

The detectability of young clusters (upper panel) and old clusters (lower panel) in the anticentre of our galaxy. Grey points show real clusters. It's clear that there's a huge void where we're not sensitive enough to say if there are more old clusters.

The detectability of old clusters, shown a different way. The two most distant catalogued clusters in the anticentre (Saurer 1 & Berkeley 29) appear to simply be lucky detections, as they sit in a small (not so reddened) part of the anticentre.

General trends in cluster detectability in the region as a function of various parameters. Mass, age, extinction, and distance are the biggest culprits.

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

favorite part of the day when the badgers come out and make noise outside of my window and I get to watch them snack on raspberries

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 04/04/2025

An interesting #galactic paper by Cameren Swiggum (@mac0598.bsky.social) et al. came out today! ☄️🧪 Extending previous work that showed most young star clusters near to the Sun came from just three regions, Cameren shows that actually *all* nearby clusters come from just three regions!

Backwards orbital integration of star clusters near the Sun in their work. Notice how all the grey dots originate in three areas. (Their Fig. 1)

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Cool paper out by Juan D. Soler et al! They looked at the line-of-sight motion of the ISM based on 3D dust maps, HI and CO line emission, creating several maps of how the dust and gas in our solar neighborhood move! 🔭🧪 www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

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Paul McMillan @mcmillan-astro.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

I'm not sure I'm emotionally prepared to say goodbye to Gaia. This video, shared by @esa.int, is the spacecraft fading from view for the final time. It's still alive, but will be switched off on Thursday. 🔭 www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NGh...

youtube.com

Final goodbye to Gaia from China

YouTube video by ESA Gaia Mission

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

not to be italian on main but if lewis turns that pole into a win i'll revert to catholicism

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

happy ides of march to those who celebrate

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Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie @mpi-astro.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

New result from MPIA: Two of our astronomers have taken a look at just how "dirty" our window into deep space is, concretely: they have mapped the properties of dust out there in the Milky Way, including how that dust absorbs light. www.mpia.de/news/science...

mpia.de

Astronomy’s dirty window to space

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have constructed the first detailed 3D map of the properties of cosmic dust in our home galaxy.

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 25/02/2025

Interesting paper out today by Efrem Maconi, @joaoalves.bsky.social et al.! They find that the Sun probably passed through a massive wave of interstellar dust and gas (the Radcliffe wave) around 11 to 18 million years ago. 🔭🧪 #milkyway #planetsci arxiv.org/abs/2502.16360

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

as much as I like to complain about austrian trains they popped off with the nightjets

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 31/01/2025

This is SUCH bullshit - so so frustrating that even factual phrases like "Science is still a male-dominated field" now have to be scrubbed from anything federally funded... 🔭

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

looking through old plots and stumbled over an ominous cluster cmd that has written 'they put me in a room' on it in the minecraft font that i have absolutely no memory of making

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Star Cluster Memes For Stellar Overdensity Teens @starcluster.meme · 03/01/2025

can't believe we only know ~5% of them 😭

A very chaotic meme with many speech bubbles around a person with the caption "I just need to find all the open clusters"

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

with @lillykormann.bsky.social working on Gaia.2, able to get to nano arcseconds precision

gingerbread gaia satellite being decorated with icing

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

wdym you dont get emotionally attached to a random open cluster (pismis 3 if youre reading this ily)

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

i was born in the wrong century, my purpose was to squint my eyes at the sun and draw poor sketches of its spots in a little notebook but instead im wrangling data and importing scikit-learn

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 13/10/2024

my body is a machine that turns pretty space pictures into poorly matplotlib.gridspec-ed plots

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

always good to be home 🏔️

hay hut with mountains in the background

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 20/08/2024

Conda for Python now costs $600/year to use if you're a researcher at a university - Anaconda are trying to milk cash out of their millions of educational users. 🔭🧪 I've been using a simpler Python management solution with pyenv for the past few years. It's free - and works anywhere! Here's how:

emilydoesastro.com

pyenv: a free and simple alternative to Conda

Conda just became VERY expensive for university users. In this post, I talk about how I use pyenv as a lightweight alternative.

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 20/08/2024

clusters are so cool, like besides being super interesting objects by themselves they are just so perfect for many cool data science gimmicks. Dimensionality Reduction, clustering algorithms? Boring. But as soon as you can understand it in the context of star clusters: most interesting thing ever

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 01/08/2024

unfortunately had to fire my intern* due to funding reasons** today *** * @lillcifer.bsky.social ** I made her change the font and label sizes on my plots *** she visited me at work and had to go back to austria again

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 15/07/2024

getting paid to do astro is pretty neat, if the weather is good enough for some bike rides/hikes: even better

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 11/06/2024

Over a hundred young star clusters near to the Sun can be traced back to just *three* distinct star-forming regions. This is a *huge* result for studying our own galaxy! 🔭🧪 The work is out today in Nature and is led by PhD student Cameren Swiggum in Vienna: arxiv.org/abs/2406.06510 Thread ⬇️

A figure from the paper, showing the positions of star clusters (coloured dots) as a function of time, and location around our galaxy. When tracing back the orbits of the clusters, it is clear that they formed closer together than they now are.

Full caption: Fig 1 (INTERACTIVE): A Galactic bird’s-eye (XY) view of the clusters’ orbits over time, showing over one quarter of
a circle (gray, dashed line) of radius of RSun=8,122 pc extending from the Galactic Center to the Sun. The location of the
Galactic Center and the direction of Galactic rotation are indicated. The five square panels show the clusters' positions as
dots at five different times: the present (upper left), 15, 30, 45, and 60 million years ago (from left to right). The center of
each panel shows the location of the local standard of rest (LSR) at each time. The three-dimensional interactive version of
this figure has a time-slider showing the cluster positions at intermediate time steps with each frame centered on the....

Positions on the sky of some of the most notable clusters in each cluster family. You would never easily know that they're related without tracing back their orbits!

Full caption: Figure 3 (INTERACTIVE): All-sky positions of the clusters’ stars and high-resolution optical images of the most
notable clusters. The background gray-scale image is the Planck 853 GHz map tracing dust emission. The colored points
show the Galactic sky positions (l,b) of individual stars belonging to the three cluster families. The circles surrounding the
all-sky plot display optical images of the notable clusters taken from the Digitized Sky Survey II and the thin, gray lines
connect these images to their locations on the sky. Since the clusters of the 𝛼Per family are on average closer to the Sun
than the other two families, their positions are more spread across the sky.

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 28/04/2024

back at it (& very happy)

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Johanna Hartke @jhartke.bsky.social · 01/04/2024

The python plotting package you never knew you needed 🔭🍝: arxiv.org/pdf/2403.203...

arxiv.org

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 11/03/2024

Our galaxy's young star clusters now have accurately measured masses, radii, and classifications! 🔭 🧪 My new paper out today uses a new method to distinguish between bound and unbound clusters, improving the usability of the cluster census and setting new observational constraints. Thread below ⬇️

A screenshot of the title and abstract of the paper.

Title: Improving the open cluster census. III. Using cluster masses, radii, and dynamics to create a cleaned open cluster catalogue

Authors: Emily L. Hunt and Sabine Reffert

I can't fit the abstract in alt text, but you can read it at this link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05143

A picture of the galaxy (ESA/Gaia DR2) with open clusters in my catalogue overlaid on top of it.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day (unofficial bot) @fanapod.baldanders.info · 06/02/2024

#apod 2024-02-06 NGC 1566: A Spiral Galaxy from Webb and Hubble Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Lee (STScI), T. Williams (Oxford), R. Chandar (UToledo), D. Calzetti (UMass), PHANGS Team Web page: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240206.html

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 29/12/2023

watching this sunrise with my dad is definitely my favorite Christmas tradition

snowy mountain range minutes before sunrise

sunrise, sun appearing in between the Tre Cime di Lavaredo

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Ali Crisp @crispyplanets.bsky.social · 08/11/2023

The Horsehead Nebula, 50 years apart. The image on the left is a scan from LSU’s plate archive. It was taken in 1973 by Dr. Howard Bond, using the 24” telescope at the old LSU observatory in Clinton, LA. 🔭

A scan of a photographic plate of the Horsehead Nebula. It is a black and white negative, but you can still make out the cloud structure.

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 08/11/2023

matplotlib.pyplot-ing the unspeakable dread of seminar presentations

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 11/10/2023

another way to tell that astrophysics and climbers are the same type of people is both will give their projects the wildest names. "Crusty Socks" could be some 5.12 or a feedback outflow that looks a bit crooked you'll never know

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 10/10/2023

saw a badger in the middle of vienna. why so friend shaped

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 15/09/2023

going thru past lecture notes and bam serotonin! a lebesgue integral bear appears

doodle of a bear in red on lecture notes

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Dr. Mike Chen @mcycee.bsky.social · 15/09/2023

Boom! Protostellar jets captured by JWST

The latest JWST image of bipolar jets shooting out of a protostar

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

austrian trains the sole bane of my existence, down to the essence of my very core i despise austrian trains

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Sophia Gad-Nasr @astropartigirl.bsky.social · 29/08/2023

Today, we have new views of the Whirlpool Galaxy from the JWST! I laid the images taken by each instrument side by side, plus the composite, and the Hubble version. You can really see how the mid IR (MIRI) brings a whole new light to galaxies! Which version is your favorite?

Whirlpool Galaxy taken in (top to bottom): JWST MIRI, JWST NIRCam, MIRI + NIRCam, and Hubble's version

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isak @isakndbr.bsky.social · 28/08/2023

la vuelta organizers fr trying to kill the riders this year lmao what is this

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