Adrian Price-Whelan
@adrian.pw
5.9K followers 190 following 120 posts
(he/him) Astronomer; Leads the Nearby Universe group at the Flatiron Institute / CCA; Asst. Director of Scientific Software @ Simons Foundation; Astropy; Music; https://adrian.pw
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Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
colindickey.com
Man, I'm sorry, but reading all these AI generated essays from students, it just sucks all the joy out of everything. It's exhausting, makes you into a weird paranoid cop, grinds you down, wastes your time, makes you feel like shit about everything.

Fuck this shit technology and all its enablers.
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
glassbottommeg.bsky.social
Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.
yeeeerika.bsky.social
i don't want to hear your most boomer complaint. what's your most millennial complaint?
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
adrian.pw
The CCA @flatironinstitute.org is hiring postdocs!

We have two types, both independent fellowships:
FRF: 3 year research fellowship apply.interfolio.com/173403
FSRF: 5 year research+software fellowship apply.interfolio.com/173402

See here for more info!
www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/flatir...

🔭
adrian.pw
The CCA @flatironinstitute.org is hiring postdocs!

We have two types, both independent fellowships:
FRF: 3 year research fellowship apply.interfolio.com/173403
FSRF: 5 year research+software fellowship apply.interfolio.com/173402

See here for more info!
www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/flatir...

🔭
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
lukemeister.bsky.social
Gargantuan Gaia review by Michael Perryman

"271 pages, 126 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Reports"

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10883
Figure 16: Sky projections, in Galactic coordinates, showing various properties of the Gaia DR3 data release (see text for details).
adrian.pw
oo say more about the audio solution!
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
bfishbfish.bsky.social
I believe one of the new mRNA vaccines was expected to treat colon cancer, and another had the potential to keep pancreatic cancer from recurring. That’s what they’re taking away.
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
aussiastronomer.bsky.social
Actually heartbreaking, the list of colleagues that have run the show behind the scenes for so many years who are saying their pre-emptive goodbyes and taking literally thousands of years of amassed knowledge and expertise with them.

Not to mention camaraderie and community.

Morale is ... bleak.
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
chanda.blacksky.app
📣📣 BOOK NEWS 📣📣

I'm excited to share the cover and release date of Book #2, #EdgeOfSpaceTime, which is now available for PREORDER!!

You can order from ANY bookstore, including your local indie!

More details on preordering here:
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

What's the book about? 🧵
[neon rainbow pattern background]
THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME

The universe reimagined -- through pop culture, poetry, and theoretical physics.

From the award-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos

image of the cover of the book which features circular artwork in the center, one half of it a black and white pattern and the other half a neon rainbow pattern

PREORDER NOW Coming 4/7/26 
image of the Pantheon logo
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
afeinstein20.bsky.social
There is an ongoing effort to coordinate observations of 3I/ATLAS among the community before it leaves the solar system! If you're interested in contributing (or seeing what's going on), you can check out the website here:

3i-atlas.github.io/coordinated....
3I/ATLAS
3i-atlas.github.io
adrian.pw
though the subject is dark, I'm loving @bsky.app because it enables random intersections like this — between some favorite political @aoc.bsky.social, scientific @chanda.bsky.social @philplait.bsky.social, and art/music @rob-sheridan.com people I follow
A screenshot of a bluesky retweet by AOC of a thread by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein with comments down the thread by Rob Sheridan and Phil Plait.
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
charlesm993.bsky.social
New manuscript by Nawaf Bou-Rabee, Bob Carpenter, Tore Kleppe and Sifan Liu on the WALNUTS algorithm which improves of the NUTS sampler by introducing a locally adaptive step size.

📜 Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18746
💻 Code: github.com/bob-carpente...
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
aussiastronomer.bsky.social
NASA is being told to cancel 19 *active* missions to save $6B, which looks to be less than the ICE *hiring/retention* budget going forward.

I need people to let that sentence sink into their bones for a minute.
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029:

- $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion
- $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million
- $8 billion for hiring/retention
- Billions more.
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
emily.space
Finding out about Gaia at #EAS2025Cork! ☄️

Just announced: Gaia DR4 will be released in December 2026!
A photo of the slide with the December 2026 release date
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
emily.space
How many open clusters could be hiding at the edge of our galaxy? 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

Our new paper out today (A&A, accepted) pioneers a new way to test the completeness of cluster catalogues built with @esa.int's Gaia mission!
The fraction of simulated clusters we recover (upper panel) compared against a dust map (lower panel.) Dust is clearly a major hindrance to seeing open clusters with Gaia. The detectability of young clusters (upper panel) and old clusters (lower panel) in the anticentre of our galaxy. Grey points show real clusters. It's clear that there's a huge void where we're not sensitive enough to say if there are more old clusters. The detectability of old clusters, shown a different way. The two most distant catalogued clusters in the anticentre (Saurer 1 & Berkeley 29) appear to simply be lucky detections, as they sit in a small (not so reddened) part of the anticentre. General trends in cluster detectability in the region as a function of various parameters. Mass, age, extinction, and distance are the biggest culprits.
adrian.pw
Normally my brain doesn't see or register the truly bizarre ads that appear randomly throughout the internet (e.g., on www.wunderground.com pages). But ... what ... why ... who ...
A bizarre internet ad with a man (?) possibly about to insert another man (?) or corpse into a third man's anus?!?
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
bencollins.bsky.social
I'm sorry but the largest protest of my lifetime is not the 7th or 8th biggest news story in the country behind "what does Gen Z want from Instagram?" This shit is humiliating. Rearrange your layout to meet this moment. Omitting the thing happening in every American city is malpractice.
The New York Times front page.
adrian.pw
running in a notebook or as a script?
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
chanda.blacksky.app
SAVE COSMIC SCIENCE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS!

I wrote about the current astronomy/particle physics/cosmology 🔭 ⚛️🧪 funding catastrophe in context of all of the other ongoing catastrophes, including what we can do to save our science.

h/t to @skylargrayson.bsky.social for posting the image.
Fund astronomy, not genocide.
You can help save cosmic science for future generations. This figure by Skylar Grayson shows how much the univese we will be cut off from studying using...
news.chanda.science
adrian.pw
for a while we had:
baby: looks at me, says "da da"
me: omg!! yea, dada!!!
baby: points at banana "da da", points at pacifier "da da", etc 😅
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
ohdearz.bsky.social
The president's budget request for NSF FY26 is also out. It zeroes out the NSF astronomy & astrophysics and NSF MPS ASCEND postdoc fellowships. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...
nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov
Reposted by Adrian Price-Whelan
rachelbc.bsky.social
Omg a picture worth a thousand tears 😭 🪐
jtuttlekeane.bsky.social
The NASA planetary science fleet chart if the president’s budget is enacted.
The NASA planetary science fleet chart. It shows two spirals with missions to Moon/Mars and the Solar System. I’ve crossed off all of the missions that will be cancelled in the president’s budget… and there are a lot of them.