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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 4d

In continued celebration of a decade of GW detections, some of the @vanderbilt.edu astrophysicists made this fun explainer video. We had a great time making this; just the right amount of cheesy delivery. My students have already gotten a kick out of it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkt...

Gravitational waves explained by Vanderbilt's top experts | College of Arts and Science

YouTube video by Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science

www.youtube.com

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · 9d

Truly wonderful to have you and Barry visit us, Saavik! We all had a great time. Hope you did too!

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Reposted by Stephen Taylor

👻SAAAAAAAAHHHHHHvik Ford 🎃 @saavikford.bsky.social · 11d

Astronomers, do you know where Seyfert (of active galaxy fame) worked?

Vanderbilt, in Nashville.

Where he was also, apparently, a tv weather guy!

I know this thanks to a DELIGHTFUL visit to the Vandy Astro group!

Thanks to @stevertaylor.bsky.social & everyone else, from undergrads to faculty!

🔭

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · May 20

My research group (aka VIPER) visited our High Performance Computing facility @vanderbilt.edu. An incredibly impressive operation, and very exciting to see the investments in GPUs for AI and scientific computing. As for the picture below, I just wanted to look cool with some servers... 🚀🔭🧪⚛️💫🪐

Stephen Taylor standing in a row of computer servers.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · May 7

Yeah, whenever I've tried using it for code, the results have been mixed. It's never perfect. But it's certainly getting better, and for small optimizations or fixes, it's like super specific stackoverflow thread. Provided it's used to assist or teach, it has utility. But not to replace.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · May 2

Very honored to have been named a Chancellor Faculty Fellow by Vanderbilt University in recognition of my ongoing drive to push the boundaries of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astrophysics! (They used a photo of me from 2019 though...😆) 🧪🔭🚀🪐⚛️💫

news.vanderbilt.edu/2025/05/01/1...

11 Vanderbilt faculty members selected as 2025 Chancellor Faculty Fellows

Eleven outstanding faculty members from across the university have been selected for the 2025 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. Each fellow holds the title of Chancellor Faculty Fellow and receive...

news.vanderbilt.edu

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Apr 10

And to be super clear, those pictures are NOT the LISA prototypes. Those are the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope being assembled!

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Apr 10

A fun and productive LISA Science Team meeting at NASA Goddard! Our team is tasked with stewarding the mission toward maximizing its science outcomes. We’re really digging into our various tasks now; we even got to see prototypes of some of the laser and optics assembles. 🧪⚛️🔭

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Apr 8

Strange enough, I did actually go up early! Vanderbilt has a default tenure clock of 7 years. Too long. I didn’t see the point of waiting around.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Apr 8

TENURE UNLOCKED 🎓🚀🧪⚛️🔭

Two people enjoying a party to celebrate tenure.

Stephen Taylor cutting a cake to celebrate his academic tenure.

A cake to congratulate Stephen Taylor's award of tenure.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Apr 3

I don't know why it makes me cringe so much when I hear a theorist refer to their research group as a lab. But it does. Where are your instruments, test tubes, and such?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 28

🔬 New paper from my group in The Astrophysical Journal!

“Deep Neural Emulation of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary Population” by Nima Laal, introduces a normalizing flow emulator for the GW background signal from supermassive black hole binaries. A big step forward! @nanograv.bsky.social 🧪🔭⚛️🪐

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 28

Amazing work from Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow, Nima Laal. Wonderful to see this published. Answering "what if you searched for everything, everywhere, all at once" in pulsar-timing array gravitational wave searches. A gigantic Gibbs sampling hierarchical fit. 🔭🧪🪐

journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...

A screenshot of a paper posted on Physical Review D.

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 24

Rewatching the 1999 blockbuster The Mummy. I love this movie, it’s vibe, it’s soundtrack, everything. But when the mummy steals the eyes of the bespectacled grave plunderer, why does the mummy not subsequently need glasses?

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 19

Professor Sarah Vigeland of UWM gives an invited plenary in the Kavli Special Session at APS. Fantastic talk! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 19

Xavi Siemens gets his APS Fellow on! Highly deserved and great to see! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 18

My student Levi Schult absolutely smashed their talk today on comparing different detection techniques for the first single GW signal expected to be found by PTAs. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 18

Dr Nima Laal, postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt in my group, tells us all about sampling data covariance matrices with Inverse Wishart distributions— everything everywhere all at once! @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 17

My student William Lamb @astrolamb.bsky.social updates us on some ambitious analytic calculations he’s been doing to model discrete binary and cosmic variance in the ensemble distribution of the stochastic GW background. @nanograv.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 17

Great talk by my student Kyle Gersbach on directional power-based searches for supermassive binary black holes in PTA data! @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 17

Learning about history of Loop Quantum Gravity. Awesome ideas. Terminology of the morning is Quantum Riemannian Geometry. Plus, curvature at Planck scale is 1e76 larger than at horizon of Solar Mass Black hole. Amazing. @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 16

See you there, Carl!

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Stephen Taylor @stevertaylor.bsky.social · Mar 16

✈️ Off to Anaheim for the APS 2025 Global Summit! Looking forward to some exciting talks, support my students and postdocs, cheering on NANOGrav folks, and delivering two talks on PTAs and LISA! 💫 @apsphysics.bsky.social @dgrav.org @nanograv.bsky.social @lisacommunity.bsky.social

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Reposted by Stephen Taylor

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · Mar 5

This is good and beautiful. (Except for time flowing downwards from the top, which makes me dizzy.)

Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · Mar 5

At last! Finished page: how a star forms, what fuels it, & how it forges new forms into being! A star is a momentary reversal - a wellspring of possibilities that makes life possible. This took me some time to figure out to say the least - but geeked to be done & move onward! #Nostos #Unflattening 2

Comics page on how a star forms, what’s going on inside, and how it’s generating new elements over its lifetime - and a reversal of entropy’s downward flow towards disorder. There’s a drawing of a star that’s about the width of the page in the center - realistic on its outside and diagrammatic on the interior. Running through it from top of page to bottom of page - is an hourglass like shape with various panels, sort of like greek meanders ornamenting it that detail various parts of the narrative here. The interior of the star shape is in four quadrants (a bit of the middle and the center are carved out by the hourglass, which i’ll get to next). upper left quadrant is a diagram of the force of gravity versue the resistance pressue of atoms being shoved together - represented by black arrows drawing inward and white drawing outward - which make a circular star shape complete with the tails of the black arrows as rays of the star. the background for this panel is a warped grid as space would be warped by this massive object. Upper right panel is a closeup on just a few of these white and black arrows - and within them - filled with more closely packed particles and then also tiny arrows pressing from outside. Lower left panel has the path light takes to leave a star - a brownian motion trail, bouncing around randomly in all sorts of directions before eventually leaving the star. The final panel within the star is a more realistic depiction of what the regions within the star might look like. On the hourglass, there are periodic stripes with panels inside them - in the other spaces, we see circles as simplified particles falling down this funnel and getting closer together as they near the center (as with hydrogen falling into a star). the first row of panels is a series of hourglasses - with sand running down. The next one is a quick retelling of the birth of the universe to the first filaments. Then the hourglasses again, now they are spinning, sand running uphill. T…

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Reposted by Stephen Taylor

William G. Lamb 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @astrolamb.bsky.social · Feb 4

@royalsociety.org why are you still honouring Elon Musk with a Fellowship of your society?

He and his cronies are tearing down US science, blocked USAid that’ll result in the deaths of thousands from disease, and supports the Far Right. Why still honour him?? 🔭🧪⚛️

royalsociety.org/people/elon-...

Fellow Detail Page | Royal Society

Explore the history of the Royal Society, including our motto and discover our timeline of key events.

royalsociety.org

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