Sabina Sagynbayeva
@sabinastro.bsky.social
1.1K followers 270 following 240 posts
(astro)Physics PhD candidate @ Stony Brook. Astrobites alum. From Kazakhstan 🇰🇿. She/her. Musical theater nerd, so pretty much insufferable. Statistics, planets, and stellar cartography. https://ssagynbayeva.github.io
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sabinastro.bsky.social
This breakfast looks so goodddd🤤
sabinastro.bsky.social
I love this little support group that we virtually created with @astroshashank.bsky.social and @benjaminpope.bsky.social 🫶🏻 haha
Reposted by Sabina Sagynbayeva
michaelzingale.bsky.social
I like my plot of equipotentials a lot, but I can never shake the fact that @sabinastro.bsky.social calls it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle plot...

zingale.github.io/stars/notebo...
a plot of equipotentials in a binary star system, showing the Roche lobes and Lagrange points.  The green color scheme makes it look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle...
sabinastro.bsky.social
Anyways, like, comment, and hire me PLEASE!!!
sabinastro.bsky.social
In the end, we have a beautiful gyrochrone that you should take with a grain of salt just like any other gyrochronal sequence! Also my sample is the largest sample of rotation periods in an open cluster to date! Yay!
sabinastro.bsky.social
So if you assume that the uncertainties in period in period and temperature are gaussian, you can imagine that the point is sliding in those error bars until it decided whether to fall on our 5th order Legendre polynomial or not.
sabinastro.bsky.social
So the mixture model took the probability weights, and assigned some stars to the background based on their location in the period-temperature space. But we accounted for uncertainties in period and temperature too!
sabinastro.bsky.social
Instead, I wrote a Bayesian mixture model. The premise of the model is that some of the stars lie on the gyrochrone, but some of the are what we called “background stars”.
sabinastro.bsky.social
For gyrochrone, I wanted to just fit a quick polynomial but Will said he’d remove his name from the paper if I did that. 😂
sabinastro.bsky.social
We had to make some quality cuts, remove giants, and we were left with 271 reliable rotations.
sabinastro.bsky.social
So to account for that, my GP kernel was a sum of the Rotation term (i.e. the period) and the term that you can think of as a RealTerm in celerite so that it models the red noise.
sabinastro.bsky.social
I used gaussian processes to create a Bayesian model to extract periods from pretty low-amplitude light curves. We looked at PSDs and they still had this exponential decline that was the “red noise” in the data.
sabinastro.bsky.social
Getting periods from the crowded fields is HARD! So Isabel had to do her own photometry with superstamps, Will came up with a new-ish de-trending method, and I was left with maximizing likelihoods! 😄
Reposted by Sabina Sagynbayeva
krxiv-astro-ph.bsky.social
Rotation Periods for Stars in Open Cluster NGC 6819 From Kepler IRIS Light Curves
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02255
Sabina Sagynbayeva, Isabel L. Colman, Will M. Farr.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02255
arXiv abstract link
arxiv.org
sabinastro.bsky.social
Some proposals are so short, and my only hope is that all the exoplaneteers in Physics departments have emailed their colleagues a schematic of transits so now everyone is on the same page lmao
sabinastro.bsky.social
I’m addicted to plasma I fear
Reposted by Sabina Sagynbayeva
astroshashank.bsky.social
New paper by me and @benjaminpope.bsky.social! How well can we map a star using optical interferometry?

This is just a submitted preprint at the moment--comments and questions welcome! (1/N)

arxiv.org/abs/2509.25433
Reposted by Sabina Sagynbayeva
aaup.org
AAUP @aaup.org · 9d
BREAKING: WE WON!!!
💥 💥 💥

Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment.

Full ruling here:
Findings of Fact & Conclusions of Law – #261 in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-10685) – CourtListener.com
Judge William G. Young: ORDER entered. FINDINGS OF FACT AND RULINGS OF LAW, PURSUANT TO FED. R. CIV. P. 52(A)(Sonnenberg, Elizabeth) (Additional attachment(s) added on 9/30/2025: # 1 Main Document) (J...
www.courtlistener.com
sabinastro.bsky.social
Super excited about my new paper coming soon with Isabel Colman and @farrwill.bsky.social !! This project quickly became another statistics bootcamp for me. 😅