Tonight, Mars disappeared for about an hour as the moon passed in front. Here they are together a little while after Mars’ lunar occultation.

Here’s to 25 years of ESA’s flagship X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton! XMM is teaching us a huge amount about black holes, and has certainly been an important part of my research career. Our discovery of X-ray echoes from behind a black hole even gets a mention!

www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Have to say I was blown away by the Wicked movie! It’s not often a movie of a musical does justice to the original stage show, but the cast, the vocals and the cinematics are truly incredible! Definitely recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet!

(Just realized that I haven't advertized the Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist on this platform.)

If you are an LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈 astronomers/astrophysicists (or an ally) and are comfortable of being out, you can join the Astro Outlist to help increase LGBTQ+ visibility and connect with local community!

A little over one year since the launch of our latest X-ray space telescope… a brilliant week in Tokyo at the XRISM Science Team Meeting, discussing all of the amazing data, revolutionising the way we look at black holes, giant clusters of galaxies, supernovae and more!

Very excited about the observations we have happening right now, using NuSTAR, XMM-Newton and NRAO’s VLBA. The first in an intensive series to understand how a supermassive black hole called 3C120 launches a jet reaching far out of its galaxy at close to the speed of light!

“Sensitive, high speed, low noise X-ray imaging detectors will be the comerstone of next-generation missions.”

And AI will be key! 🔑

@danwilkins.bsky.social & team have developed prototype AI algorithms to identify valid X-ray and cosmic-ray induced background events. #SPIEastro

Excellent news about Athena, as the ESA SPC formally endorsed the re-scoped mission. The Athena X-ray observatory is a vital part of the astrophysics landscape going forward, for understanding everything from supermassive black holes and giant clusters, to galaxy formation, and stars and planets.

Find out how @HEXP_Future, the next-gen broadband X-ray probe, will advance many facets of astrophysics in new papers out today, including how supermassive black holes grow, how they govern galaxy growth, how we can find hidden black holes, and more! arxiv.org/search/advan...

We currently have the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories performing long, 7 day observations of the really interesting supermassive black hole MS22549. This black hole shows a mysterious wave-like variation called a QPO. We hope to figure out what causes it and what it is telling us!

A successful few days in Tucson for the annual PIs’ review meeting for our NASA APRA programmes. It’s always great to hear updates about all the cool projects our colleagues are working on, developing technologies for next-generation space missions, and what a nice venue too!

It was a bit touch and go with the clouds, but we just managed to see this morning’s annular eclipse… and the break in the clouds perfectly coincided with the maximum, when the Moon covered about 80% of the Sun!

New paper out today! Exploring new methods, based on wavelet transforms, to measure how X-rays echo off of the material falling into a black hole. These transform the static picture we have of the turbulent region outside the black hole into a movie arxiv.org/abs/2309.13107

Congratulations to the entire team on the successful launch of XRISM today. Here’s to every success as the mission enters its critical commissioning phase, and I can’t wait until we start analysing the first data from the black holes it will observe!

An exciting day at Stanford Student Observatory. We have our new 0.7m PlaneWave telescope installed and (pretty much) ready to go! Can’t wait until we start getting our first on-sky images!

Waiting on the edge of my seat for the @XRISM_jp launch! Launch coverage starts in just under an hour and launch is scheduled for 9:26:22 JST / 0:26:22 UTC www.youtube.com/live/3TTTJ20...

It looks like I’ve finally made it over here! Expect posts about astronomy, physics, science communication and education, with a little bit of travel (especially ships and planes) on the side