Featured Astrobites
Our latest posts
The Floor is Magma! (But that’s a good thing)
Do magma oceans help planets form and retain water oceans?
Sowing the CEERS of Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe
How did supermassive black holes grow in the early universe? Finding faint and distant AGN with JWST may help us unravel this mystery!
Can we identify the host galaxies of LISA sources?
The upcoming LISA mission promises to detect many gravitational wave events, but can it attribute any of them to a host galaxy? Let’s find out!
Today in (Astro) Shop Class: How to build a molecular cloud?
The authors of today’s paper create a model of molecular clouds that can help us understand how they form stars!
Where’s the Edge of a Planetary System?
Many exoplanet systems are found to contain similar sized planets at evenly spaced orbits within the system. Where does this pattern end? And could it be due to a Jupiter like planet at the outer reaches of the system?
Nu models to study a new supernova
Today’s paper discusses the possibility of seeing neutrinos from the recent bright supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy!
Beyond astro-ph
Astronomy beyond the research
Interview with 4 Early-Career Malaysian Astronomers
In today’s post, we sit down with the students who organized the IAUS 377 conference on Early Galaxy Formation in Kuala Lumpur!
Kepler-111b’s Place in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
In today’s paper, the authors use a network of radio telescopes that spans the globe to help refine future searches for alien life.
AzV 493 and its Variable Dance
In today’s paper, learn about the strange behavior of a variable star, and a possible explanation for its strange behavior: an invisible dancing partner!
Navigating careers in astronomy
Career advice
Advisee to Advising (your first research student)
As graduate students in astronomy progress through their degree-granting programs, they evolve from students into teachers, mentees into collaborators, and occasionally from advisees into advisors. Taking on a younger student to advise them on a research project may seem difficult, stressful, or daunting, and that’s because it can be. But it can also be an incredibly enriching, exciting, and fun experience for you and your student. Advising students, to many, is one of the most rewarding aspects of doing research, but it’s one that many graduate students may not experience over the course of their Ph.D., in part because it can appear so intimidating.I won’t claim to be a great expert on the subject, but this summer I advised my first undergraduate researcher on a project, and my hope is that this Astrobite can serve as an encouragement to others who might be interested in taking on that kind of responsibility during their Ph.D.Your opportunity to advise a research student varies dramatically depending on your employing institution, research group, and funding situation. You might work in a large lab, where older graduate students are expected to supervise younger graduate students; you might be your advisor’s only student; you yourself might be funded through a teaching assistantship, a large grant, a fellowship, or a variety of these; your institution might have money set aside for PIs to take on undergraduate summer students. The point is, most student projects aside from undergraduate theses or unpaid internships require funding in order to compensate the researcher for their work, and often the source of this funding is beyond your capacity to influence.In my...
Meet the AAS Keynote Speakers: Meenakshi Wadhwa
We interviewed @ASU planetary scientist and #MarsSampleReturn principal scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa who will be giving a plenary talk today at #AAS242!
Meet the AAS Keynote Speakers: Joel Kastner
Learn all about beautiful planetary nebulae with Joel Kastner at his plenary talk at #AAS242 this afternoon! We interviewed Kastner about his journey into astronomy here: