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vincentmackay.bsky.social
Postdoc at MIT, previously U. of Toronto, McGill You can mostly trust my posts on: 🌌 cosmology 📡 radio telescopes 🎹 piano 🎼 music theory ...take everything else with a grain of salt. Fr/En | He/Him | vincentmackay.github.io | Somerville, MA
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I could've saved the Planck team a whole lot of trouble by just saving the COBE map in jpeg a bunch of times

Devastating for scientists and their research, and everyone who benefits from that research. I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.

This is one of the most incredible JWST pics so far imo

JWST fully solves the mystery of “Little Red Dots” How did those "Little Red Dot" galaxies get so bright and abundant so early on? It isn't just stars at work, but an active and _overmassive_ black hole, too. bigthink.com/starts-with-...

This is too good not to share in English too: Ravel's heiress is his brother's nurse's brother's second wife's daughter from another marriage. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

Aurora progression! what a show it was :) #aurora #northernlights #alaska

I hope all the new bots that started following me in the past week will enjoy this picture of the moon that I took with my phone and a 127 mm telescope

If you start Wicked now, at 11:59:59 she'll go ooh aohaoooh

This weird JWST trick lets us “see” dark matter By using color inversion plus galaxy/cluster light models, scientists can find "excesses" of light. Remarkably, they help trace out where the dark matter is. bigthink.com/starts-with-...

From least to most impressive: - partial lunar eclipse - comet - meteor shower - partial solar eclipse - northern lights - other planets through telescope - jupiter or saturn through scope - moon through scope - annular solar eclipse - milky way (in its own category:) - total solar eclipse

35 years ago today a gunman walked into an engineering classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, separated the women from the men and killed 14 of them. It was the ultimate manifestation of the gender-based bias and violence we still face in STEM today. We must never forget. 👩🏻‍🔬 🧪

(future employers please don't read) this is very accurate

People who use wavenumber instead of wavelength: who hurt you? 🪐✨️🔭

People talk about wickeds marketing budget, but the boys must be huge

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Radio astronomer: The cup adds 5 kelvins to the system temperature...can we make it out of teflon? Maybe drill a few holes in it? And get rid of the water?

Wake up babe, new pretzel shapes just dropped

What is common knowledge in you field but shocks outsider? Usually, the further things are, the smaller they appear...but if they're reaaally far, they start looking bigger again.

Relatable but also: I’d like to talk a little bit about this headline, which is, in my opinion, an example of dysfunction in science reporting today. (Since there’s no alt text, headline reads: “This Black Hole Is Eating So Much Matter that It Defies Known Science”, from 404 Media) 🧵

Haven't had time to read the paper (I have a ton of questions!) but this looks cool. First time I read "Baryon Acoustic Oscillation" in the singular form. Fun stuff!