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JJ Hermes

@jjhermes.bsky.social
277 followers 168 following 55 posts

Always be looking up. Former Texan, current Associate Professor of Astronomy at Boston University. sites.bu.edu/buwd

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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
BU is seeking applicants for observatory manager for the Perkins 1.8-meter telescope, to be based in Flagstaff, AZ. Application deadline this Friday: aas.org/jobregister/...
aas.org
Observatory Manager and Research Scientist | American Astronomical Society
Applications are invited for the position of Observatory Manager and Research Scientist for Boston University’s 1.8-m Perkins Telescope Observatory, located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, starting Novemb...
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Jennifer Johnson @jajohnson.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Really excited for #DR20 today from @sdssurveys.bsky.social. Over 50,000 white dwarf spectra, with many new ones from the Southern Hemisphere!
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Phil Plait @philplait.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
This oxygen emission line can only occur in very rarefied gas: if atoms collide enough it deexcites the electron and you don't get the line. It took a long time to figure that out (it's very hard to get such low density oxygen in the lab), and the ubiquity of this line baffled them for many years.
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Johanna Teske @johannateske.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Oh my gosh Isabel's website is a true delight analopezmurillo.github.io
analopezmurillo.github.io
Ana Lopez Murillo
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
BU grad student Stefan Arseneau showed that an ultramassive (>1.2 Msun) white dwarf has less than half Earth's radius, but is so dense that photons suffer a 175 km/s redshift escaping its gravity, indicating it most likely has an oxygen-neon core! Check out the result here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.19441
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Keaton Bell @astrokeat.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
New #stellarastro paper with @jjhermes.bsky.social about a large outburst from the bright pulsating white dwarf star GD 1212. With fantastic data from NASA's Kepler/K2! The modeling effort was led by CUNY @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social PhD student Andrew Dublin. Read here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.09987
Mode Instability and a Massive, Isolated Outburst in the Pulsating White Dwarf GD 1212
Hermes, J. J. ; Bell, Keaton J. ; Dublin, Andrew H. ; Montgomery, M. H. ; Kawaler, Steven D. ; Clark, Ian ; Vanderbosch, Zachary P. ; Dunlap, Bart H. ; Tremblay, P.-E. ; Chote, Paul ; Gaensicke, Boris T.

The top panel shows the full 76.1-day K2 Campaign 12 light curve of GD 1212, with observations roughly every 60 s.
A large flux outburst is observed on Day 61; a zoom-in on the event is shown in the bottom panel. A sinusoidal model of the
dominant pulsation periods in roughly 4-hr windows before, during, and after the outburst are labeled on the plot in red, green,
and blue, respectively. The dominant pulsation signals in outburst have generally shorter periods and larger amplitudes, but
return roughly to quiescent behavior in less than 1 day.
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Leigh Fletcher @leighfletcher.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
New factoid shared at a meeting here at Space Telescope: #JWST's guiding is so stable that it's like flying a laser pointer on a drone in Washington DC, and pointing it perfectly at a dime (like a UK 5p coin) in San Francisco ~4000 km away.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
I simply cannot cognitively offload the fact that the president of the country I live in is this unhinged. This has got to stop.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
I didn't expect this: FIRE data suggests that Creighton was the most ideologically conservative campus in the entire US in 2025.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Very nice FIRE dataset on ideological leanings of US campuses, fully downloadable on GitHub (github.com/chapin-lenth...). Here are current campus breakdowns of ideological leanings vs. right-wing tolerance.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
This line from James Gleick has been in my head rent-free for months: "Using ChatGPT to write your term paper is like bringing a robot to the gym to lift weights for you." (www.nybooks.com/articles/202...) So I abused GPT-5.4 into illustration this self-criticism.
Using AI to do your coursework is like paying for an expensive gym membership and hiring a robot to lift the weights for you.
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Alex Ji @alexji.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
🔭 Storytime! This paper consumed my soul for a month and it turns out that you have to look at your 2D spectroscopic data. Thread... ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024OJAp...
Screenshot of paper text: In particular, our Na D detection is in direct conflict with the clear non-detection shown in their extended
data figure 1. We thus downloaded the data used in X23 from the SMOKA archive (Baba et al. 2002) and reduced it in IRAF (Tody 1986, 1993; Fitzpatrick et al. 2024) with the HDS routines. The S/N of the HDS spectrum is lower than the HIRES spectrum, but we clearly see the two stellar Na D lines, as well as the stronger interstellar absorption components (Fig 1). The stellar Na lines are also visible on the raw 2D science image, where we identify some cosmic rays near the Na D lines.
We suspect cosmic ray removal could have impacted the data reduction in X23. Furthermore, the 2D inspection shows that the star is not centered on the slit, making sky subtraction more difficult. As a final check, we measured equivalent widths of the lines we analyzed in our reduction of the HDS spectrum, finding no significant differences after accounting for spectrum noise. In any case, our higher S/N Keck/HIRES spectrum should provide a more reliable abundance analysis
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
6/10
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
This should be getting better as we leave solar maximum. Here's an update of HST altitude vs. sunspot number.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
If you were dropped at a random point in the Milky Way, there is a less than one in a hundred billion chance (1 in 100,000,000,000) that you'd ever have enough starlight to read a book.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Great result from BU graduate student @lbor.bsky.social hit the arXiv today shedding light on the origins of strange white dwarfs that have stopped cooling for billions of years: "WD Merger Remnants with Cooling Delays on the Q Branch Lack Strong Magnetism" arxiv.org/abs/2602.02670 (1/7)
arxiv.org
White Dwarf Merger Remnants with Cooling Delays on the Q Branch Lack Strong Magnetism
A population of anomalous ultra-massive white dwarfs discovered with Gaia, often referred to as the Q branch, show high (multi-Gyr) cooling delays produced by exotic physical mechanisms. They are beli...
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
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David Dickinson @astrodave.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
You might’ve heard the news: SpaceX just passed 10,000 Starlink satellites launched. And that number is already old news, as there’s now a new Starlink batch launched every other day. Here’s what that looks like in a short animation of Comet A6 Lemmon courtesy of Michael Jaeger:
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 19/06/2025
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
And a new EO late last month (www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...) reclassifies NASA employees in a way that instantly stripped them of their union representation. Goddard plays a huge role for NASA and it is being kneecapped by the Trump administration.
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The Planetary Society @planetarysociety.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Here are all the missions that face cancellation as part of a devastating 47% cut to NASA's science program. www.planetary.org/articles/bil...
planetary.org
Billions wasted, mysteries unsolved: The missions NASA may be forced…
Proposed NASA cuts would cancel dozens of space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Drone show over Boston Harbor for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. I’m sure just as he’d have expected.
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NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory @rubinobservatory.org · 17/04/2025
Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests have begun at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera! 🔭🧪 After installing and testing the LSST Camera, we turned the telescope to the sky—a moment 20 years in the making! With that, Rubin #CommissioningNotes are back ✍️ 🧵
Around two dozen people sit and stand at a long desk with computer monitors out of view. Several people are smiling or have their mouths open in amazement. One person in the back has their arms raised in celebration.
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Steve Kawaler @stevekawaler.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
Success! IWitnessed the Mayan serpent god Kukulkan’s #equinox appearance at Chichen Itza! On the equinoxes, the stepped pyramid’s corner casts a shadow from the setting sun onto the staircase, making a diamondback snake whose head is illuminated at the bottom. #astronomy
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Gene Kranz: "Failure is not an option" Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes"
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
LLMs continue to disappoint me. Have a look at this swing and a miss from what should be in a LLM wheelhouse.
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Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Jupiter rotation timelapse with lo (and shadow) transit! Taken Feb 8th from my backyard. Went out at 5 min intervals to capture a video. From each of these, the best 10% were stacked to produce a single frame (lucky imaging). 🔭C9.25, 📷 QHYII1585C #jupiter #astrophotography #astronomy
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
Trying to keep calm knowing that this federal funding move blatantly violates the Impoundment Control Act and will be challenged quickly (www.stevevladeck.com/p/120-the-im...). But it's clear that the Velociraptors are out of the cage and are currently testing the limits of the enclosure.
stevevladeck.com
120. The Impoundment Crisis of 2025
The Trump administration's Monday spending freeze is likely to provoke a crisis over the constitutionality of "impoundment"—one that the justices could well have to resolve *very* soon.
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
I just got proofs back from ApJ and I'm deeply disturbed by how a copy editor thought this was a valid correction. Am I crazy? Is there ever a valid reason to use "consensual" in this way? What is a "consensual picture"?!
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JJ Hermes @jjhermes.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
Here's a fun backstory to a paper too many years in the making: "Sporadic Dips from Extended Debris Transiting the Metal-Rich White Dwarf SBSS 1232+563" (arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050) which just hit the arxiv.
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Sloan Digital Sky Surveys @sdssurveys.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
A story we ❤️about how exploring the Universe can re-ignite passion. And we don't mind that it's about looking at our white dwarf spectra in @jjhermes.bsky.social group 🤩🔭 www.bu.edu/articles/202...
bu.edu
Written in the Stars: How a BU Undergrad Rediscovered Her Passion for Space Science
Astrophysics student Ariyana Bonab has studied the composition of 54,000 white dwarf star images—but she almost gave up on the subject
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Jennifer Johnson @jajohnson.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Updated periodic table with origin of elements in the Solar System (for boron and lithium at least)
periodic table of the elements color-coded by origin in the solar system. Learning more at this conference about how much of orange should be turned green
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