iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

My first time seeing the Milky Way!!! 🌌 Feels almost embarrassing that I haven't had the opportunity to see it since I am a 3rd year astrophysics PhD student, but sadly light pollution exists! 📌 Death Valley

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Our Synthesizer has now been published in JOSS! 🎉

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RAS Journals @rasjournals.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Published in #MNRAS: "Cloudy-Maraston: integrating nebular continuum and line emission with the Maraston stellar population synthesis models", Newman et al. This is Fig. 1: read the paper at academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... @royalastrosoc.bsky.social @academic.oup.com

Our chosen M24 ionizing spectra for solar metallicity with ages varying from 10^6 to 10^8 yr, shown with dashed lines at the wavelengths associated with the energies required to ionize H^0 to H⁠^+, He^0 to He⁠^+, and O^+ to O⁠^(2+).

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AstroArxiv @astroarxiv.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Using white dwarf lensing to resolve accretion flows. Sophie L. Newman et. al. arxiv.org/abs/2509.10674

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

I'm excited to announce that after two years, my Masters project has finally been submitted to MNRAS and is available to read on arXiv! 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2509.10674

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

I'm SO excited to write the follow up paper to our April Fools Day paper after The Life of a Showgirl comes out - was our Taylor expansion correct? Will there be 12 ± 5 unique astrophysics words in her next album?! arxiv.org/abs/2503.24188

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Some fun facial expressions while giving a talk to 90 teenagers considering if astrophysics is for them! #astroedu

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

A super fun video tour of the amazing outreach work done we did this week! #astroedu

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

Had such a fun time explaining the wonders of @eucliduk.bsky.social to those at @goodwoodrrc.bsky.social yesterday! Time to spot some F1 cars today! 🏎️

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Euclid UK @eucliduk.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

It’s Day 3 at the the @goodwoodrrc.bsky.social #FestivalofSpeed Future Lab. Our #HumansOfEuclid have had an early start, back and ready to share the mysteries of the dark Universe all over again! 🌌🕸️

Some of the Euclid team at the Euclid exhibit. Five people are standing together smiling for the camera. One person is knelt in front of them, also smiling for the camera. Behind them in the background is a spiral galaxy, one of Euclid’s images displayed on a huge screen.

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Excited to be helping out with this tomorrow!!

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

finally got through my official offer letter from @flatironinstitute.org ... Alexa play Welcome to New York by Taylor Swift 🗽

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

being given money to buy books because I like talking to teenagers about physics and happen to be good at it? sounds like a great deal to me

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Micah @rincewind.run · 17/05/2025

RIP, Ed, you steely-eyed missile man real heroes use duct tape

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

A bizarre day of doing physics outreach at Portsmouth Comic Con! Never thought I'd be dressed as Feyre from ACOTAR while teaching others how to make a JWST model 👀

A collage of four photos: 1) a queue of characters in cosplay, 2) a girl in cosplay with a JWST model she made, 3) me dressed as Feyre from ACOTAR with corresponding prop wings, 4) some fun book merch!

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Had a super lovely day at the Royal Astronomical Society for their Specialist Discussion Meeting titled 'Exploring extreme stellar populations and initial mass function in the Universe' where I gave a talk on the impact of stellar rotation and Wolf-Rayet phase temperatures on high-redshift spectra!

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

New week new Physics Chat video! Start the week well by listening to my friends and I chat to Xan Morice-Atkinson ( @xangma.bsky.social ) about his interesting path into academia! #astroedu www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Ef...

youtube.com

The Many Paths to Academia | Physics Chat with Xan Morice-Atkinson

YouTube video by Field of View

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

late post but I'm always so, so thankful to all the women who have reminded me that I'm not alone in this often hard and isolating environment of academia!! (Image cred: @abbierosie_ on IG) #internationalwomensday

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Very little research but lots of fun was had today while designing some rockets and learning about concepts such as centre of pressure with fifteen year 8 students who are on the JET Blue Skies programme! #astroedu www.joneggingtrust.org.uk/blue-skies/

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

10/10 homemade office decor 🌟

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

A brainchild project of mine came to life today at our department's yearly outreach event for local families in Portsmouth! It was so satisfying seeing all the prep I did make children super happy 🌟

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Sesh Nadathur @seshnadathur.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Stargazing at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards is on tonight from 6 pm! Kids and adults can learn about cosmology, space and navigation, and use some telescopes. I will be giving a public talk on "A History of the Universe in 40 Million Galaxies" at 6:30. historicdockyard.co.uk/event/starga...

historicdockyard.co.uk

Stargazing - Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

Explore the cosmos with this Stargazing event. Gaze at the stars, learn celestial navigation, and hear from leading astronomers. Interactive activities for all ages.

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

First science-y book I've read in a long time and I'm really enjoying it! Have also made the switch from Goodreads to Storygraph if you fancy following me there (@sophiephys)! 📖

A hand holding the book Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

This morning I had the opportunity to convince people why it's important to do forward modelling and choose their stellar population models carefully at my first conference!

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Chris Lovell @chrislovell.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Come join us in Bristol in May for our meeting on Simulation Based Inference for Galaxy Evolution! We've got some very exciting speakers lined up (stay tuned), abstract submission deadline February 1st sbi-galev.github.io/2025/ #astronomy #astro #extragalactic #astrocode

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Julia Milton @yuliamilton.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

JPL is one of NASA's major science and climate centers—home to the Mars rovers and 1000s of people. Firefighters held back the flames at JPL’s gates, but many of our coworkers lost their homes. Here’s a thread of their public GoFundMes if you can share & support however possible:

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Chris Lovell @chrislovell.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Fantastic work from Sophie, and some potentially big implications for the modelling of stellar populations in the early Universe..! Check out the models here, including some nice interactive notebooks to get you started: sophie-newman.github.io/cloudy-maras... #astronomy #extragalactic #astrocode

sophie-newman.github.io

Cloudy-Maraston

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

It's a very happy first-author paper day for me! In this thread I'll explain some of the exciting results from my paper nicknamed 'Cloudy-Maraston' with the aid of doodles inspired by the amazing work of @clairelamman.bsky.social ! arxiv.org/abs/2501.03133

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

exciting crafts are in progress...

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James Trayford @trayford.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Check out this article from STFC about our sonification of astronomical data, and beyond! including a new sonification at the end - perceive multi-scale information about galaxy formation in our cosmological simulations... 🧪🔭⚡🐡. medium.com/big-science-...

medium.com

The sound of silence: how sound brings space to life

The vacuum of space is famously silent, but what if you were able to use sound to help you visualise the Universe? What would a black hole…

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

I've been having a lot of fun designing a JWST craft for kids to make at our big Stargazing event early next year - please let me know any thoughts or suggestions! #astronomy #astroedu

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Clara Nellist @particleclara.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

From today, 100 women have been to space! 🚀🌌 Emily Calandrelli, aka @thespacegal, crossed us over that line, following in the footsteps of many adventurous women. From Valentina, to Emily, and beyond - ad astra ✨

Emily Calandrelli, wearing a blue flight suit, exits the 'RSS First Step' spacecraft with an American flag decal on the side. She raises her hands in celebration while someone nearby applauds. In the background is a desert landscape with mountains. The sun is shining.

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James Trayford @trayford.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Follow the (growing) Starter Pack for the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation (ICG) - Find out about our investigations into Gravity, Galaxies, Sonification & more at the University of Portsmouth, UK 🌌🔭 go.bsky.app/SScAL4f

go.bsky.app

Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation - Portsmouth

Join the conversation

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 24/11/2024

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Astronomer: In this work, we propose HoFITCh (HOw Full Is That Cup), a Bayesian model for sampling the fullness of cups from imaging data and prior beliefs. We sample the posterior of our model, and find that the cup is 50±2% full.

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Today we have a new video on the channel Field of View! We chat with Sravan Kumar, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth, all about different theories in physics and whether we can connect them to observations! www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA3l...

youtube.com

How do you prove a theory? | Physics Chat with Sravan Kumar

YouTube video by Field of View

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

A highlight of this year was helping with the ‘James Webb Space Telescope: First Years of Discovery’ exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition! It was so lovely and encouraging seeing children and teenagers get excited about the telescope and the science it can do 🔭 #astronomy #astroedu

A large scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope, along with large images taken by the telescope.

Sophie Newman, a woman with brown hair and glasses, standing in front of an image of the Pillars of Creation taken by JWST.

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James Trayford @trayford.bsky.social · 13/06/2024

Check out our showreel for the STRAUSS code 🌌🔭 🎵🎧! A glimpse into some of the things that we can do to explore data with sound. We're looking to explore data outside astronomy too. Try out the code (www.audiouniverse.org/research/str...), or get in touch if interested! youtu.be/h1muFAEMmOs?...

youtu.be

Sonification Examples Show Reel (STRAUSS)

This is a show reel produced by our STRAUSS code as part of our Audio Universe project (www.audiouniverse.org). This highlights some of the amazing things th...

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Chris Lovell @chrislovell.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Hi Bluesky 👋 here's an arXiv announcement for ya Our new Learning the Universe paper is on the arXiv today, using luminosity functions and colours to perform simulation based inference on cosmological and astrophysical parameters arxiv.org/abs/2411.13960 learning-the-universe.org

arxiv.org

Learning the Universe: Cosmological and Astrophysical Parameter Inference with Galaxy Luminosity Functions and Colours

We perform the first direct cosmological and astrophysical parameter inference from the combination of galaxy luminosity functions and colours using a simulation based inference approach. Using the Sy...

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 27/08/2024

Last week we put on arxiv the 16th paper from the FLARES team, exploring the panchromatic sizes of massive high-redshift galaxies: arxiv.org/abs/2408.11037. This was done by Paurush Punyasheel, an excellent master's student, who did his thesis with me, at the the Cosmic Dawn Center, DTU Space. 1/3

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

so many beautiful and distant red blobs!

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