Jessica Lu
@jluastro.bsky.social
420 followers 68 following 16 posts
Astrophysicist, Associate Professor @UCBerkeley. Interested in black holes, stars, galactic centers, astronomy instrumentation, adaptive optics.
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jluastro.bsky.social
It is being implemented as we speak. Voluntary at first (incentivized retirements/early leave) and later, layoffs. If we do nothing, we will lose half of NASA Goddard (and most likely all of NASA).
jluastro.bsky.social
NASA Goddard is pushing through a 48% staff reduction!!! This could impact the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and many other future Astro missions. News coverage seems not sensational enough. Are we really going to let NASA (as we know it) die quietly? www.space.com/space-explor...
NASA begins push to slash workforce with more staff buyouts, early retirements as budget cuts loom
NASA employees have until July 25 to decide if they'll stay or go.
www.space.com
Reposted by Jessica Lu
profsera.bsky.social
Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.
Reposted by Jessica Lu
carlrodriguez.bsky.social
Also of note/horror: this budget makes the 30M downselect explicit (GMT, not TMT) --
Reposted by Jessica Lu
dangaristo.bsky.social
Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...
MPS budget
Reposted by Jessica Lu
aussiastronomer.bsky.social
TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.
A screenshot of the number of people involved in NSF activities being reduced from 330,100 to 90,000.
Reposted by Jessica Lu
stsci.edu
A key portion of #NASARoman has cleared a thermal vacuum test. Tt was subjected to the hot and cold temperatures it will experience in space: go.nasa.gov/43cwDQL 🔭 🧪
A huge subsystem of the Roman observatory in a thermal vacuum chamber. Seven technicians stand of the side of the observatory, as the bottom of the chamber.
jluastro.bsky.social
For you foodies out there, I highly recommend this conference tradition. Great food and meet new people!
orifox.bsky.social
What a night. The third annual #FoodieDinner was an awesome time. We had an undergrad, director of the Chicago Astro Society, @jluastro.bsky.social, Nathan Smith, Dan Castro, and Pierce Prize Winner Maria Drout. Most important, amazing food from #VermillionVA. #AAS245
jluastro.bsky.social
Interested in black holes or the Galactic Center check out Thursday sessions at #AAS243 by MovingUniverse Lab grads, Natasha Abrams (440.05) and Anna Pusack (420.05). Lots of new results!
jluastro.bsky.social
Friend of mine owns and spouse is chef at Gris-Gris: grisgrisnola.com (not in French Quarter).
jluastro.bsky.social
First author, Casey Lam, put together the known population of Milky Way black holes:
Galactic black hole population.
jluastro.bsky.social
Update on the gravitational lensing black hole, OB110462. It is definitely a black hole and our revised photometric and astrometric analysis gives a mass of 6 +/- 1 Sun. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03302
Reposted by Jessica Lu
jluastro.bsky.social
AstroTechers working on grating design principles and inclusive teamwork skills today at #AstroTech!
jluastro.bsky.social
The young stars orbiting the supermassive black hole probably formed in a complex dynamical structure... not just a vanilla "ball of gas".
jluastro.bsky.social
And the structure looks asymmetric. That means there are more stars on one side of the orbital plane than another. This makes us think it is not a plane so much as a stream of stars perhaps recently disrupted.
jluastro.bsky.social
This Plane 2 structure might be associated with some stars in the IRS 13 clump of stars:
jluastro.bsky.social
We have known for sometime that the young stars' orbits aren't randomly distributed. There is a preferred disk of young stars that contains 20-30% of the young stars in the region. But, in our new paper, we have found a second structure!
jluastro.bsky.social
In Jia, Xu, Lu, et al. we present a study of the dynamics of young stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acb939/pdf
jluastro.bsky.social
Hello BlueSky! I'm an astronomy professor at UC Berkeley working on black holes, star clusters, the Galactic center, and the instruments and telescopes needed to study them. As a further introduction, I'll post a brief thread on my research group's latest published paper.