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Jessica Lu

@jluastro.bsky.social
446 followers 68 following 16 posts

Astrophysicist, Associate Professor @UCBerkeley. Interested in black holes, stars, galactic centers, astronomy instrumentation, adaptive optics.

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Reposted by Jessica Lu
kkranyak 🫘 @kkranyak.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
#SaveNASA
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Why oh why? arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...
arstechnica.com
White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act
“We would be turning off some fabulous missions that are doing extremely well.”…
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
It is being implemented as we speak. Voluntary at first (incentivized retirements/early leave) and later, layoffs. If we do nothing, we will lose half of NASA Goddard (and most likely all of NASA).
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
NASA Goddard is pushing through a 48% staff reduction!!! This could impact the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and many other future Astro missions. News coverage seems not sensational enough. Are we really going to let NASA (as we know it) die quietly? www.space.com/space-explor...
space.com
NASA begins push to slash workforce with more staff buyouts, early retirements as budget cuts loom
NASA employees have until July 25 to decide if they'll stay or go.
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Sera Markoff @profsera.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Carl Rodriguez @carlrodriguez.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Also of note/horror: this budget makes the 30M downselect explicit (GMT, not TMT) --
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...
MPS budget
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Dr. Jessie Christiansen @aussiastronomer.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.
A screenshot of the number of people involved in NSF activities being reduced from 330,100 to 90,000.
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci.edu · 08/05/2025
A key portion of #NASARoman has cleared a thermal vacuum test. Tt was subjected to the hot and cold temperatures it will experience in space: go.nasa.gov/43cwDQL 🔭 🧪
A huge subsystem of the Roman observatory in a thermal vacuum chamber. Seven technicians stand of the side of the observatory, as the bottom of the chamber.
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
aasnova.org/2025/04/02/r...
aasnova.org
Rapid Microlensing Classification: A Lonely SOBH Story
Astrobites reports on how we can use simulations of stellar populations to rapidly estimate the identity of the lensing object in a microlensing event.
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Sarah Kendrew @sarahkendrew.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
My heart goes out to the good people who had to endure this at the NSF today www.wired.com/story/nation... 🧪
wired.com
National Science Foundation Fires 168 Workers as Federal Purge Continues
Firings at the NSF included permanent employees who had already completed their one-year probationary period, as well as at-will workers.
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings
democrats-science.house.gov
Were you fired by President Trump? | House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
For you foodies out there, I highly recommend this conference tradition. Great food and meet new people!
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 11/01/2024
Interested in black holes or the Galactic Center check out Thursday sessions at #AAS243 by MovingUniverse Lab grads, Natasha Abrams (440.05) and Anna Pusack (420.05). Lots of new results!
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 27/12/2023
Friend of mine owns and spouse is chef at Gris-Gris: grisgrisnola.com (not in French Quarter).
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 09/08/2023
First author, Casey Lam, put together the known population of Milky Way black holes:
Galactic black hole population.
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 09/08/2023
Update on the gravitational lensing black hole, OB110462. It is definitely a black hole and our revised photometric and astrometric analysis gives a mass of 6 +/- 1 Sun. arxiv.org/abs/2308.03302
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Reposted by Jessica Lu
Sarah Kendrew @sarahkendrew.bsky.social · 29/07/2023
ESA’s Euclid mission has reached L2 where JWST and Gaia are waiting 💕 www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Spa…
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 18/07/2023
AstroTechers working on grating design principles and inclusive teamwork skills today at #AstroTech!
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
The young stars orbiting the supermassive black hole probably formed in a complex dynamical structure... not just a vanilla "ball of gas".
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
And the structure looks asymmetric. That means there are more stars on one side of the orbital plane than another. This makes us think it is not a plane so much as a stream of stars perhaps recently disrupted.
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
This Plane 2 structure might be associated with some stars in the IRS 13 clump of stars:
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
We have known for sometime that the young stars' orbits aren't randomly distributed. There is a preferred disk of young stars that contains 20-30% of the young stars in the region. But, in our new paper, we have found a second structure!
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
In Jia, Xu, Lu, et al. we present a study of the dynamics of young stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/…
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Jessica Lu @jluastro.bsky.social · 05/07/2023
Hello BlueSky! I'm an astronomy professor at UC Berkeley working on black holes, star clusters, the Galactic center, and the instruments and telescopes needed to study them. As a further introduction, I'll post a brief thread on my research group's latest published paper.
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