🥳 Today we got the abstracts for all the contributed talks for a symposium that I am co-organizing the European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting. 50 abstracts for about ~10-12 slots, it's going to be hard to decide who gets to speak! But why organize a session at all? 1/5
My favorite thing at conferences is to learn new things, find new interesting implications of my own work, and to get to know people with whom I can work on these new ideas. So this is what I am aiming at when organizing a session. 2/5
The big European Astronomical Society meetings are great for that because they bring together people working in different fields. Last year, we were very successful bringing together people working on "clumpy" accretion in different types of objects: 3/5
This year, a different group is organizing a session where we discuss the birth (in supernova explosions), life (as accreting X-ray binaries where black holes gets material of the companion star) and death (in mergers observed through gravitational waves) of black holes. 4/5 Black & white sketches of a...
I myself work on the "life" part, so I am there to learn about birth and death! I also mentioned my self-organized collaborations last time. This session grew out of one of those collabs, when we sat down and asked ourselves what we want to know more about! 5/5

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More from @realscientists

11 Mar
Want to see how an astrophysics paper is happening in fast forward? Here you go!
That was the last paper of my own PhD and my PhD advisor made the movie to visualize how the scientific writing process happens. 1/5
[Movie description: series of screenshots showing 14 pages of an astrophysicsts paper, starting with only writing & two plots on the first page, constantly growing, with changing and increasing numbers of plots]. 2/5
The important thing here is that everything is in flux, until the last moment. Figures change and move around. Text gets added and re-structured, everywhere. In short: paper writing is not a linear process. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
11 Mar
I'm also co-organizing a third session at the European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting: "Astronomy for Planet Earth: forging a sustainable future".

Just look at out amazing poster!

The session grew out of @Astro4Earth efforts to address the #climatecrisis. 1/7 Session poster.  Title &quo...
Why do we care? Astronomy does not only look out into the Universe, but also provides a unique perspective on our tiny place in the Universe and the fragility of our Earth. We know we are a tiny grain of dust in the universe and that there is no planet B. 2/7
Here is the @Astro4Earth take on explaining this in a video: 3/7
Read 7 tweets
10 Mar
So we got an X-ray telescope that has observed a black hole in an X-ray binary. But how does one access the data? This is such a cool question with a rather simple answer: the data is publicly available! 1/5
Usually, an observation happens because someone wrote an observational proposal and got time on a telescope to observe a certain source. The data obtained will sometimes become immediately public, but usually will stay "private" to the proposers for 6 to 12 months. 2/5
A proposal is a lot of work, so the idea is that the original team gets a chance to work on it and to do a good, thorough job! Then the data goes into archives. There are many different ones. A really cool one is #ESASky by @esascience sky.esa.int/?target=185.47… 3/5
Read 5 tweets
10 Mar
Anybody else here doing #sciart? If yes, what inspires you? What tools are you using? Are you using your art in your actual scientific work in some way?
I really got into science cartoons/sketches - the most successful so far was the PhD bathtub: 1/4
I've been doing a lot of (traditional) drawing and painting back in school and at the beginning as an university student, but I stopped later due to stress & all the (international) moving and tiny apartment of first the PhD and then postdocs. 2/4
I then heard of sketchnotes & graphic recording and loved the idea. I first tried them on paper, then bought myself and ipad. Never actually managed to get into proper graphic recording, but science doodles turned out to be fun! 3/4
Read 4 tweets
10 Mar
More on conferences! Yesterday (see ⬇️), I talked about the scientific session I am organizing at this meeting. But I am organizing two more: first, a lunch session on "Healthy Careers in Astronomy" (organized with @8minutesold ). Why spend our lunch break on this topic? 1/5
A high number of folks in academia are affected by mental health issues (e.g. nature.com/articles/nbt.4… [paywalled!] or mind-and-brain.institute/education/the-… [open summary]). And it's unsurprising if one thinks about work-related stressors, especially among earlier career folks. 2/5
People work on short-term contracts away from their support networks, often in foreign countries that do not offer help in English (the working language of science) or people's mother tongue. And because astronomy is so international, we may be even extra affected. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
9 Mar
And the correct answer is a few hundred millions ~stellar mass black holes! And thanks to everyone who voted, no matter what your answer was!
Two questions remain though: (1) How do we know this? (2) And what does this have to do with X-ray astronomy? 1/8
Answer to (1): We know that stellar mass black holes (with a mass of roughly 3 to 20 solar masses) are created as end point of the evolution of massive stars. Such stars die in a supernova and leave a black hole behind. 2/8
Looking at the stars in out Milky Way today, combined with our knowledge of star formation, we can tell how many such stars existed in the past. And thus how many black holes they have created. But: black holes are tiny! For every solar mass, their radius is only 3 km. 3/8
Read 8 tweets

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