Matt Bothwell
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mattbothwell.com
Matt Bothwell
@mattbothwell.com
Astrophysicist, science communicator, author, human person

🪐 Public Astronomer at the University of Cambridge 🏛️ Bye-fellow at Girton College, Cambridge 📚 Author of The Invisible Universe, Astrophysics for Supervillains, & more

www.mattbothwell.com
Astronomy convention goes
- 1st author, who did the most work and wrote the paper
- Then a handful of names, roughly in order of how much they contributed
- Then everyone else in the collaboration listed alphabetically

The ‘last author’ is just someone with a surname late in the alphabet… 🔭🧪
October 26, 2025 at 8:48 AM
As Douglas Adam’s said, “I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand”
October 26, 2025 at 8:42 AM
A colleague of mine has three different models, shaped differently to represent different gravitational potentials (point source, galaxy, and cluster)
October 22, 2025 at 6:42 PM
It is glass! And the other side is flat.
October 22, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Sadly I have no idea! It pre-dates me, and was bought many years ago
October 21, 2025 at 9:36 PM
Side view!
October 21, 2025 at 2:41 PM
It is regular glass optics, but it’s a piece of glass specifically made so the lending matches the gravitational lending profile of a galaxy. This video shows it a bit better
October 21, 2025 at 2:39 PM
October 20, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Amazing stuff, bravo.
August 9, 2025 at 8:45 AM