We find a nice signal, with a clearly interpretable strucutre, though we haven't yet tried to disentangle it from the signal around foreground galaxies themselves, usually called galaxy-galaxy lensing. We have some ideas for that in future work.
Paper Day! arxiv.org/abs/2603.04025 Mehraveh Nikjoo, a PhD student at the University of Gdansk, led our search for a lensing signal around ridges in foreground galaxy density fields.
It makes sense in context, I promise!
The fun part of Catherine going off to London to fight for astronomy funding is that she isnβt around to stop me ending our grant proposal with the words βPeppa Pig Goes To Outer Spaceβ.
Two people on a dark stage wearing black with microphones in the middle of a stand up show. Catherine has her trademark red heals on, as always. Joe is trying to compete with his red trainers but isn't nearly as classy.
Reminiscing today on our old stand-up show & @joezuntz.bsky.social's uncannily prophetic joke
"her main duty is to fight the Astronomer Royal for England. And fortunately he's 80, so one quick smack with an 18 inch telescope & down he goes"π
ARπ΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ Ώ v New ARπ¬π§ STFC CEO Westminster: 4th Mar
I think I'm now at the point where I could best speed up my research by offering to help other people using the same computing cluster optimize their code.
@royalastrosoc.bsky.social I just had to choose "Prefer not to say" for everything on the final "Diversity" section of your Michael Penston Prize nomination form because it was completely unclear if you were asking for info about me or about the nominee. Might be worth clarifying on the page.
I was especially proud of rhyming βwent in six by sixβ with βarchaeopteryxβ.
Academic presentations are a really good training ground for thinking on your feet, and being able to answer really varied questions.
That training tonight allowed me to improvise ten verses of βThe Dinosaurs Went In Two By Twoβ when my son decided that was the goodnight song he wanted.
Full text is here: public.oxford.gov.uk/online-appli...
I love that the resulting planning dispute ended up being decided by the secretary of state. And the chief planner wrote the wonderful: "any system of control must make some small space for the the dynamic, the unexpected and the downright quirky, or we shall all be the poorer for it"
This looks very nice, but the killer feature in conda-forge for me is support for non-python dependencies. It looks like this is focused just on pypi, so python only.
This is brilliant, Iβm going to get fake credit for half of the Dark Energy Survey!
I made a thing.
Iβm pretty sure OJA counts as a mainstream journal now!
This was the basis of another of my comments on @astroroyalscot.bsky.socialβs code
First paper from my PhD student Yun-Hao Zhang! arxiv.org/abs/2508.20903 While preparing to put together data for another project, Yun-Hao came up with a way to improve a technique from our colleagues for galaxy redshift estimation. This is the first of two papers laying out and testing the method
So there's about a seventeen different likelihood codes for the Planck CMB mission. Can anyone explain to me which are 1) currently widely useful, 2) handy to keep to compare old results to, 3) obsolete?
I did have to add a handwritten exam to make sure they could actually write some code unassisted.
Weβd planned to return for #NAM2025 but the conference wifi wonβt display this account. Or the program. Or anything about NAM. Is the conference itself now unofficial @robertmassey.bsky.social ?
Just arrived for #NAM2025. Very nice to be here, and seen people I know already - hi @ritatojeiro.bsky.social! Weirdly I can't seem to get to the conference even website though.
There is a concept called "stolen valour", where people pretend to be military to get prestige or free stuff.
I think in science and other discourse we see a lot of "stolen rigour": authors borrow a concept from maths/stats/some "hard" science, and use it to give authority where it isn't deserved.
I actually sent feedback about this to AQA a few days ago, as the largest exam board.
When you're writing exam questions you really have to go through them like a lawyer and see if you can misconstrue a question in any way at all. Any possible interpretation, no matter how sensible, at least one student will use!
If you read the first letter of every paragraph it spells out "George was right".
I am looking for a PhD student to work on beyond 2-point statistics for galaxy clustering & weak lensing as part of my Grant "Probing cosmic large-scale structure beyond the average" Details: uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/417... Please share in your networks and encourage candidates to apply!
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Baryon-free S_8 tension with stage IV cosmic shear surveys" by Ottavia Truttero, Joe Zuntz, Alkistis Pourtsidou and Naomi Robertson (University of Edinburgh, UK).
astro.theoj.org/article/1299... IV cosmic shear surveys"
We should tell students that in this situation itβs perfectly fine to accept the offer from the group and then change your mind later. They havenβt signed a contact.
First 2025 release of GLASS is out: github.com/glass-dev/gl...
It comes with a big change that allows you to easily create FLASK-like simulations from a set of n(z) without simulating the entire lightcone. This isnβt usually the best way to go, but can sometimes be.
[3/3] That's what it's felt like trying to use the "R" programming language this week.
