This is the saga I never knew I needed

Having a great time meeting with my fellow BHM-RM working group this week and visiting my old postdoc stomping grounds at Penn State!

Prof in grad school: "If you are finishing things before deadlines, you don't have enough to do." Grad student me: "Maybe I am just better at time management!" (didn't say this out loud). Me as faculty: *Doesn't get anything done until the deadline because I'm too busy*

See the difference between a clear air over Madison and a blanket of wildfire smoke through the lens of the UW Atmos/Ocean Sci rooftop cameras.

Made some cookies to celebrate the NANOGrav PFC announcement! Fortunately you don't need pulsars to detect these #GravitationalWaves (a mouth works fine)

Today I got to visit Yerkes Observatory! Yerkes Observatory What an awesome place! Thanks Ulla-Britt Lundgren for inviting me over!!

Taylor Lautner is the only one doing celebrity right. Take the money from your giant franchise and enjoy your quiet and unproblematic life. Marry a nice person with the same name as you. Practice your backflips in obscurity until Taylor Swift asks to see you.

Aurora alert! We may be able to see the Aurora from many of the northern states on Thursday! usnews.com/news/best-stat…

On the nose 😂

A few of our BHM team members are representing at the “Multi-wavelength AGN Structure and Cosmological Applications” conference in Nice! We’re learning about all things AGN and enjoying copious amounts of French pastries. Here we are at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur!

This week's BHM science paper highlight is "The SDSS-V Black Hole Mapper Reverberation Mapping Project: Unusual Broad-Line Variability in a Luminous Quasar", by logan fries Fries et al. (2023). The paper can be found here: arxiv.org/abs/2301.10252 1/3

The 2023 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

AstroTwitter: I’m working on my Intro to Astro class playlist (songs I play as the students come in each day) and need songs related to each lecture topic. So far I’m a bit short on Light, Spectra, and telescopes. Any ideas? (Popular/known songs preferred but I’ll take others)

Everyone at #AAS244 this week, stop by the University of Wisconsin-Madison / Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR) booth in the poster hall!! Get your own selfie with Bucky Badger, and pick up some stickers, enter a raffle for a WiCOR t-shirt, and grab other UW swag!!

Also this week at #AAS244: a special edition of Astronomy on Tap - Wednesday June 12th at 7pm at the Chazen Art Museum! More info: astronomyontap.org/event/aotmadis… (and yes, the museum will be open so you can look at art during intermission!)

Planet GJ 3470 b is cool - literally and figuratively. New work from Thomas Beatty on James Webb Space Telescope data shows exciting atmospheric chemistry that will help tease apart how the planet (and others like it) were created. #aas244 news.wisc.edu/small-cool-and…

A new X-ray study of over 8,000 rapidly growing black holes, combined with state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations, has provided the best modeling to date of the growth of the supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies. More: s.si.edu/bhsim #AAS244 ⚫

Check out some of my work with one of my students here at UW-Madison! Some fun results on quasar winds with data from SDSS-V/Black Hole Mapper, a part of Sloan Digital Sky Surveys!

Light from the bright disk around a black hole 10 billion light years away tells Dr. Kate Grier (Beatty)'s gang UW-Madison Astronomy that wind from the quasar is pushing gas out into its galaxy — giving the black hole a say in the creation of stars. news.wisc.edu/wind-from-blac…

Robert Wheatley Years of data from Sloan Digital Sky Surveys SDSS-V/Black Hole Mapper gave the researchers a front-row seat to observe the quasar, a blue dot in the constellation Boötes called SBS 1408+544, and Dr. Kate Grier (Beatty) says there's much more to see.