iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

In continued celebration of a decade of GW detections, some of the @vanderbilt.edu astrophysicists made this fun explainer video. We had a great time making this; just the right amount of cheesy delivery. My students have already gotten a kick out of it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkt...

youtube.com

Gravitational waves explained by Vanderbilt's top experts | College of Arts and Science

YouTube video by Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Truly wonderful to have you and Barry visit us, Saavik! We all had a great time. Hope you did too!

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👻 Saavik ‘Spooky Season’ Ford 🎃 @saavikford.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Astronomers, do you know where Seyfert (of active galaxy fame) worked? Vanderbilt, in Nashville. Where he was also, apparently, a tv weather guy! I know this thanks to a DELIGHTFUL visit to the Vandy Astro group! Thanks to @stevertaylor.bsky.social & everyone else, from undergrads to faculty! 🔭

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

My research group (aka VIPER) visited our High Performance Computing facility @vanderbilt.edu. An incredibly impressive operation, and very exciting to see the investments in GPUs for AI and scientific computing. As for the picture below, I just wanted to look cool with some servers... 🚀🔭🧪⚛️💫🪐

Stephen Taylor standing in a row of computer servers.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Yeah, whenever I've tried using it for code, the results have been mixed. It's never perfect. But it's certainly getting better, and for small optimizations or fixes, it's like super specific stackoverflow thread. Provided it's used to assist or teach, it has utility. But not to replace.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Very honored to have been named a Chancellor Faculty Fellow by Vanderbilt University in recognition of my ongoing drive to push the boundaries of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astrophysics! (They used a photo of me from 2019 though...😆) 🧪🔭🚀🪐⚛️💫 news.vanderbilt.edu/2025/05/01/1...

news.vanderbilt.edu

11 Vanderbilt faculty members selected as 2025 Chancellor Faculty Fellows

Eleven outstanding faculty members from across the university have been selected for the 2025 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. Each fellow holds the title of Chancellor Faculty Fellow and receive...

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

And to be super clear, those pictures are NOT the LISA prototypes. Those are the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope being assembled!

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

A fun and productive LISA Science Team meeting at NASA Goddard! Our team is tasked with stewarding the mission toward maximizing its science outcomes. We’re really digging into our various tasks now; we even got to see prototypes of some of the laser and optics assembles. 🧪⚛️🔭

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Strange enough, I did actually go up early! Vanderbilt has a default tenure clock of 7 years. Too long. I didn’t see the point of waiting around.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

TENURE UNLOCKED 🎓🚀🧪⚛️🔭

Two people enjoying a party to celebrate tenure.

Stephen Taylor cutting a cake to celebrate his academic tenure.

A cake to congratulate Stephen Taylor's award of tenure.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

I don't know why it makes me cringe so much when I hear a theorist refer to their research group as a lab. But it does. Where are your instruments, test tubes, and such?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

🔬 New paper from my group in The Astrophysical Journal! “Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary Population” by Nima Laal, introduces a normalizing flow emulator for the GW background signal from supermassive black hole binaries. A big step forward! @nanograv.bsky.social 🧪🔭⚛️🪐

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Amazing work from Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow, Nima Laal. Wonderful to see this published. Answering "what if you searched for everything, everywhere, all at once" in pulsar-timing array gravitational wave searches. A gigantic Gibbs sampling hierarchical fit. 🔭🧪🪐 journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...

A screenshot of a paper posted on Physical Review D.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Rewatching the 1999 blockbuster The Mummy. I love this movie, it’s vibe, it’s soundtrack, everything. But when the mummy steals the eyes of the bespectacled grave plunderer, why does the mummy not subsequently need glasses?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Professor Sarah Vigeland of UWM gives an invited plenary in the Kavli Special Session at APS. Fantastic talk! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Xavi Siemens gets his APS Fellow on! Highly deserved and great to see! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

My student Levi Schult absolutely smashed their talk today on comparing different detection techniques for the first single GW signal expected to be found by PTAs. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Dr Nima Laal, postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt in my group, tells us all about sampling data covariance matrices with Inverse Wishart distributions— everything everywhere all at once! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

My student William Lamb @astrolamb.bsky.social updates us on some ambitious analytic calculations he’s been doing to model discrete binary and cosmic variance in the ensemble distribution of the stochastic GW background. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Great talk by my student Kyle Gersbach on directional power-based searches for supermassive binary black holes in PTA data! @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Learning about history of Loop Quantum Gravity. Awesome ideas. Terminology of the morning is Quantum Riemannian Geometry. Plus, curvature at Planck scale is 1e76 larger than at horizon of Solar Mass Black hole. Amazing. @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

✈️ Off to Anaheim for the APS 2025 Global Summit! Looking forward to some exciting talks, support my students and postdocs, cheering on NANOGrav folks, and delivering two talks on PTAs and LISA! 💫 @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org @nanograv.bsky.social @lisacommunity.bsky.social

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

This is good and beautiful. (Except for time flowing downwards from the top, which makes me dizzy.)

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William G. Lamb 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @astrolamb.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

@royalsociety.org why are you still honouring Elon Musk with a Fellowship of your society? He and his cronies are tearing down US science, blocked USAid that’ll result in the deaths of thousands from disease, and supports the Far Right. Why still honour him?? 🔭🧪⚛️ royalsociety.org/people/elon-...

royalsociety.org

Fellow Detail Page | Royal Society

Explore the history of the Royal Society, including our motto and discover our timeline of key events.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This sounds like fun, Chris. What's the format? We started an Astronomy On Tap here in Nashville, but it sounds like you've managed to get professional comedians involved?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Congratulations to Priya on this amazing achievement!

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Huge congratulations to Maura McLaughlin, Xavier Siemens, and all of NANOGrav on being awarded the 2025 Rossi Prize by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the @aasoffice.bsky.social! It's wonderful that this field is being recognized. But there's much more to come from PTAs! 🔭 💫

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Oh, I dabble in astronomy as a professor of it.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

OK, let's see if I can properly follow the instructions my grad student gave me to sign up to the astronomy feed here... @bot.astronomy.blue signup

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

It’s becoming more obvious to me when people use ChatGPT to write statements. I realize the concept of adversarial networks makes this seem unlikely, yet there’s a style and tone that sticks out. Problematic when these statements are for elected roles.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

So honored to have given a talk at the IoA’s 50th Anniversary Conference at Cambridge, where I earned my PhD. This was in July, but the talks are now online. Earlier this year, I was privileged to deliver the Eddington Lecture there as well. Watch my lecture here: youtu.be/pLOQ6e6Ip08

youtu.be

Hunting supermassive black-hole binaries – Stephen Taylor

YouTube video by Cambridge University Astronomy

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

If you’re into pulsar timing, gravitational waves, or black-hole astrophysics, this paper is a must-read. It blends AI innovation with cutting-edge astrophysics to address one of the hottest topics in the field. 💡✨ #AstroAI #GravitationalWaves 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2411.10519

arxiv.org

Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black-hole Binary Population

While supermassive black-hole (SMBH)-binaries are not the only viable source for the low-frequency gravitational wave background (GWB) signal evidenced by the most recent pulsar timing array (PTA) dat...

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This emulator lets us rapidly and accurately predict SMBHB population properties and their impact on the GW background. It’s a game-changer for interpreting pulsar timing data and constraining astrophysical models of black-hole mergers. Bravo, Nima! 🙌

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Why normalizing flows? Traditional approaches (like Gaussian processes) struggle to capture the rich, non-Gaussian features of GW distributions from SMBHBs. Normalizing flows offer a flexible, data-driven way to emulate complex, multimodal distributions. A leap forward for PTA analysis! #GWB

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Gravitational wave backgrounds (GWBs) detected by pulsar timing arrays hold clues to the universe’s most massive binary systems: supermassive black-hole binaries (SMBHBs). Nima’s paper introduces a deep learning emulator to model these systems with unprecedented precision. #PTAs #Astrophysics

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

🚀 New research alert! My postdoc, Dr. Nima Laal, just put out a great new paper: “Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black-Hole Binary Population” 🌌. He developed a normalizing-flow emulator to tackle challenges in understanding the GW background. 🔗 Check it out: arxiv.org/abs/2411.10519

arxiv.org

Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black-hole Binary Population

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 10/06/2024

💫 Not only that, she carried out the first Bayesian mock discovery process for different massive black-hole binaries, sifting through potential host galaxies in a value-added galaxy catalog from NANOGrav.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 10/06/2024

🔔 Looking forward to the next big scientific milestone for PTAs, she studies the influence of signal-to-noise, pulsar proximity, and source mass on the GW localization ability of PTAs. Yes, proximity to pulsars makes a big difference!

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 10/06/2024

🚨 New paper! Very proud of my student Polina Petrov, who just submitted the first paper of her PhD --> arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04409

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 13/05/2024

Wait, you have an official employee dress code?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 09/05/2024

Agreed. I recently updated from a 2019 Intel Mac to a 2022 M3 Pro, and it's been pretty seamless. The only thing to watch out for is that occasionally you'll want to conda install packages that work for osx-64 which aren't available for arm64. That's ok and just requires a few prefacing commands.

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Christopher Berry @cplberry.bsky.social · 16/04/2024

Neat! Gaia spots a 33 solar mass black hole in the Milky Way! www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow... BH3 matches what is quite common in our gravitational-wave observations, but had yet to be discovered in our own galaxy Paper: doi.org/10.1051/0004... 🔭🧪

Mass vs orbital period plot of galactic black holes. Gaia BH3 is the most massive and also the longest period

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Niels Warburton @nielsw.bsky.social · 16/04/2024

Abstract submission for the LISA Symposium closes on the 20th of April. This year the Symposium has parallel sessions allowing for a wide range of talks. If your research relates to LISA in any way then there is a place for your work at the Symposium. Register at: www.lisasymposium2024.ie

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

Noticably darker here in Nashville, with all the neighborhood birds chirping as if its dusk. 95% totality is still incredible. Incredible. Beats even my first eclipse experience from 1999 in the UK, which kicked off my whole passion with astronomy.

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