#physics

🏆 Poster Prize at the LIGO Virgo KAGRA Collaboration Meeting 🏆

🎉 Congratulations to our colleague Lorenzo Pompili! Lorenzo is a PhD student in the “Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity” department at @mpi_grav in Potsdam. Last week he won the prize for the best poster in the “Theory” category at the March 2025 meeting of the @LIGO Virgo KAGRA collaboration in Melbourne, Australia.

His poster presented new tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity using gravitational waves from the final stage of a binary black hole merger. During this “ringdown”, the black hole settles into its final post-merger configuration and emits gravitational waves at specific frequencies.

If Einstein's theory is correct, these frequencies depend only on the black hole's mass and spin. By measuring the frequencies, it is possible to test for deviations from Einstein's theory.

#PhDLife #PhD #PosterPrize #science #physics #relativity #GravitationalWaves

Mastodon! I'm delivering a talk to a couple of grade 9 classes in a month on the use of space (mainly satellites, but probes to other planets, comets, etc., will be included).

How does your work benefit from satellites?

I'm thinking of a direct use of the data, as opposed to stuff like “internet access” or “my bank relies on satellites to transfer my grant money from one account to another” 😄

Anecdotes, rants, personal stories are all fair game 😊
(To the inevitable suggestion that I just Google this, yes, I can, and have, but I want the human element - I want to be able to say "someone I ‘know’ uses satellites for their job, and this is what they like about the tech”)

Hashtag suggestions are welcome.
(Also - question: Does Mastodon discriminate hashtags with different capitalization? Are #Astronomy and #astronomy functionally different? We *really* need some kind of ISO standard 😉)

#Archaeology #Physics #SolarActivity #Geology #SevereWeather #Climate #ClimateChange
#Satellite #Satellites #Agriculture #oceanography

Growing Ice

While much attention is given to the summer loss of sea ice, the birth of new ice in the fall is also critical. Ice loss in the summer leaves oceans warmer and waves larger since wind can blow across longer open stretches. Those warmer waters and more dynamic waves affect how ice forms once autumn sets in. Higher waves mean that ice tends to form in “pancakes” like those seen here. Pancake ice is small — typically under 1 meter wide — and can only be observed from nearby, since they’re smaller than typical satellite resolution. Only once there’s enough pancake ice to dampen the waves will the pieces begin to cement together to form larger pieces that will form the basis of the year’s new ice. (Image credit: M. Smith; see also Eos)

#fluidDynamics #iceFormation #oceanography #pancakeIce #physics #planetaryScience #science #seaIce

A Stellar Look at NGC 602

The young star cluster NGC 602 sits some 200,000 light years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Seen here in near- and mid-infrared, the cluster is a glowing cradle of star forming conditions similar to the early universe. A large nebula, made up of multicolored dust and gas, surrounds the star cluster. Its dusty finger-like pillars could be an example of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities or plumes shaped by energetic stellar jets. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/JWST; via Colossal)

#astronomy #fluidDynamics #fluidsAsArt #instability #nebula #physics #science #stellarEvolution