Making it harder for early-career researchers to move to the UK makes it harder for us to do science, and to provide opportunities to British students and postdocs. We're already losing brilliant people who can't pay the fees associated with moving here.

Celebrating Gaia's 10th birthday with some cake 😍 loved making the Milky Way map edible❤️✨ #gaia #esa ESA Gaia

Gaia spots Milky Way's most massive black hole of stellar origin! It's 33 solar masses, dormant, 2nd closest to Earth at ~2000 light years away, part of a wide binary with an old giant star, with estimated age of 11 Gyr: youtu.be/cU00B-6DeSQ #GaiaBH3 cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow_2…

Paper day: arxiv.org/abs/2404.11604 We show that Gaia BH3 is part of the ED-2 star cluster. The update astrometry puts GaiaBH3 in excellent agreement with the orbit of ED-2. Using some ESO data we got last period we also show that ED-2 is very likely a disrupted globular cluster

Absolutely beautiful and amazing work! Sometimes one is truly lucky, I mean what are the odds that the 2nd heaviest BH in the MW (after Sgr A*) is part of a stream (ED-2 for our Emma Dodd and characterized by Eduardo Balbinot) that we were studying using spectra from ESO?! 🤩🤩

We already thought ED-2 was a pretty exciting stream and hosting the Gaia BH3 system really adds to that! 💫

I made a ppt summary of the awesome ESO Gaia BH3 results with thoughts on formation of massive BHs and results from Eduardo Balbinot and Amedeo Romagnolo and some bonus fun facts (like the one below): , a PDF is available here: broekgaarden.nl/floor/wordpres…

🔭 The ancient accretion of a dwarf galaxy, and the way that its stars still move together, may give a clear indication of the structure of the Milky Way's dark-matter halo, so say Woudenberg & Helmi in my #arXivoftheweek arxiv.org/abs/2407.21790

My first first-author paper is on ArXiv now! With Dr. Andrew Cooper, we used the DESI Legacy Survey to study the projected density profiles and number counts of globular clusters around 707 nearby galaxies. Check out the results at arxiv.org/abs/2408.07124

So long and thanks for all the fish! I just observed my last star this morning... #GaiaDPAC and European Space Agency Gaia teams will do their best to make some great data releases from all the data I gathered! #GaiaDR4 in 2026, #GaiaDR5 around the end of the decade. Keep posted for our news

Our Milky Way-mapper ESA Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission. Over the last decade, it has made more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects, revolutionising the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

The Gaia spacecraft is now successfully passivated. Sharly, the girl from the fairing logo waves Gaia a final goodbye. She also sent her farewell to Gaia: "I waved while you soared up into the sky, now I wave you a proper goodbye." youtube.com/shorts/UmuvxKX…

I built the Lego Milky Way that I got as gift for my PhD defence and added on the glow in the dark ED-2 stream stars that were also gifted! It’s so wonderful and feels very special! Lego Gaia is observing the Lego ED-2 stream ✨🌌