Kaley Brauer 💫 Profile Banner
Kaley Brauer 💫 Profile
Kaley Brauer 💫

@kaleybrauer

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@NSF postdoc fellow at @Harvard @CenterForAstro studying colliding galaxies & exploding stars丨astrophysics PhD @MIT 丨enthusiastic dancer 🌌💃🦆 she/her

Cambridge, MA
Joined February 2010
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 months
Want to learn about galactic archaeology, aka how we study the history of our galaxy? I collaborated on this ***incredible*** comic about my research with Jenny O’Grady at MassArt!!! 1/2
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
northern rockhopper penguins are unreasonably glamorous
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
In order to avoid the Miss/Ms./Mrs. nonsense, I’ve decided to buy a boat until I finish my doctorate. Please refer to me as Captain Brauer from now on
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
I’ve reached this point of paper writing
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Same vibe
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
assume a spherical duck
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Why properly document code while writing it when you can do it a year later, slowly and with great difficulty
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Got interested in science as a kid because I wanted to invent force fields and now all I do is debug code? I feel tricked
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
Paperwork is officially signed, so I’m excited to be starting as an @NSF fellow at Harvard Smithsonian @CenterForAstro after my PhD! In honor of the occasion I pulled out my sweatshirt from when I interned at the CfA back in 2016
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
I love pictures of adaptive optics lasers because it always looks like we’re trying to blow up a planet
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
6 years
How am I supposed to focus on work when this is sitting on my desk
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Happy Halloween!! This year’s overly niche costume: hello I’m a helium flash💥🌟🔥
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
“Conservapedia”, the site that gave us such great articles as “overcoming homosexuality”, has a page on Hermitian matrices for some reason.... and OF COURSE the matrix they give isn’t even Hermitian 😂
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
about to give my first invited seminar talk!! in related news, invite me to come talk if you want to hear about computational research on galaxy evolution & the origin of heavy elements :)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
My mom sent me a galaxy mask 😷😊
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
how often do you SWEAR this is the week you finally fix that bug or work on that paper draft? & how often does it ACTUALLY happen? my arXiv April Fools paper, "I'll Finish It This Week" And Other Lies, contrasts work expectations with reality 😳😳 (1/n)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
It still blows my mind how much the neutron star merger GW170817 brought the astro community together. For those unfamiliar, the paper describing it has almost 4000 COAUTHORS, about a third of ALL astronomers in the world! 🤯
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
. @toomanyspectra just defended her thesis in a basement with a piece of bamboo as her pointer, a legend
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Wouldn’t it be nice if academic papers had the occasional joke
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
First few minutes of an exoplanet talk
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
1 year
Officially Dr. Brauer 🍾❤️
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Gigi wishes
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
“yeah I know python”
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Me @ my qualifying exam In other news, ya girl’s a PhD Candidate now!!!!
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
finishing up my time at @BerkeleyLab & excited to share a preliminary video of our simulation modeling neutron star merger ejecta!! turbulent mixing is always so gorgeous
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Binary star system: don’t talk to me or my sun ever again
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Maybe you’ve heard of nuclear pasta, but how about neutron soup? 🍜 Some neutron stars “glitch” every few years, meaning they suddenly spin faster for a few seconds. This could be b/c neutron stars have a fast-spinning “neutron soup” layer that can couple to the outer crust.
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
If you ever feel bad about getting something wrong, remember that theoretical predictions for the cosmological constant were off by a factor of 10^120
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Since astro twitter is one of the only places this will be understood, hello everyone I’m a Messier object 🌌✨💫 #NASAcostume
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
say hi to my* galaxy!!!! this baby's gonna be the backbone of my PhD thesis 🤞 in ~a year this galaxy (along with two others not pictured) will be simulated in super high-res down to the scale of feedback from individual stars!! 🌟🌟 *co-parented by my incredible collaborators
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
you guys MIT undergrads have a swim requirement to graduate but since everything‘s virtual right now seniors are taking a “conceptual swim class”
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
I digitally painted a Hot Jupiter (open for a surprise?)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Very confused by scientists being offended by jokes about their research. Do other scientists not constantly roast each other? Grav wave research = is it a black hole or did someone burp near ur detector. Exoplanet research = stamp collecting. Supernovae research = ok y’all cool
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
googling my error message & getting no results
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Caturn
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
This is a REAL picture of the nebula around the star Betelgeuse! The star is shedding its outer layers & radiating them, creating these beautiful colors This is also the future of our Sun! ⭐️ In ~5 billion years, the Sun‘ll blow off material as a nebula (& become a white dwarf)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Reached the “dyed my hair pink” stage of quarantine
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
excusez moi
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
made a plot today
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
1 year
4.7 billion year old carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, “the oldest rock I’ll ever hold”, and the most recent lunar soil core sample from Apollo 17 (until Artemis collects more), a sample from the moon’s surface to 30 cm deep!! #NASASocial #OSIRISREx #ToBennuAndBack
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
and repeat
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
how does it keep happening
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
thinking about Animals That Look Uncomfortably Like A Person In A Costume
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
I listened to too many talks at 1.5x speed and now real life is slow & off-putting
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Cons of virtual conferences: hard to meet people, time zone issues, zoom fatigue, etc etc Pro of virtual conferences: I get to act out my weather woman dreams
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
My oral qualifying exam is in a month and jury is still out on whether or not I’ll pass, but jury is in on my study notebook being the snazziest
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
I defend my thesis in one month 😳 currently making simulation videos for the presentation & I’m a big fan of this one of Pop III star explosions in early galaxies
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Time for my favorite method of studying: carrying my textbook around with me everywhere and never opening it
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Why do we call them vets when we could call them dogtors
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Hi everyone please say hello to little Ellie aka Elle Belle aka my family’s fuzziest new member and the reason I won’t be doing any work this break 😍😍
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
1 year
Right outside the clean room containing the pristine asteroid sample! It’s carefully contained to avoid contamination from terrestrial microbes #NASASocial #OSIRISREx #ToBennuAndBack
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
when no one else is using the cluster so I can just throw my inefficient scripts on all the cores
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
To understand the universe, we must look at it in different ways This is the *same object* (Hydra galaxy cluster) viewed at diff wavelengths of light! In X-ray we see hot gas, in optical we see galaxies, & in radio we see jets. Only together can we begin to see the full picture!
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Reading this astro textbook from 1931 and scientific illustrations have really gone downhill in the last century
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
This gorgeous photo is by Tui de Roy!! World renowned photographer with a whole penguin book:
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
This is why I dressed as a Messier object. It relates to my studies literally & figuratively
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
#AAS235 is in two weeks so I made a bingo card
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
new mug monday 🦕
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
My Bluetooth mouse died and now I’m on a forced break because this is how it charges 😐😑
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
Thinking about the time an outreach group wanted to film me “working on research” and I didn’t know what to do so I just typed ls into my terminal a bunch of times
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Caught on camera: live footage of me going through the motions of working but accomplishing nothing
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
aaaand just gave my second invited talk thanks to this post!! self promotion feels weird but don't be afraid to promote work you're proud of talk was recorded & will be posted here in a bit :)
@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
about to give my first invited seminar talk!! in related news, invite me to come talk if you want to hear about computational research on galaxy evolution & the origin of heavy elements :)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
my current favorite genre of pictures is Animals Being Interviewed
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
6 years
Apparently astronomers used to believe that the moon formed by pinching off of a pear-shaped Earth 🤔🥚🍐 (courtesy of a textbook from 1931)
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
A short intro for my new followers - hi, I’m a galactic archaeologist! :)🕵️‍♀️🌌 Similar to traditional archaeologists who study human history by excavating and interpreting old artifacts, I study the history of our galaxy through observations of old stars
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Our galaxy is a Pringle! Aka, it’s not flat. It’s warped & twisted at the edges like a Pringle chip! 🌌 A recent study used 2431 Cepheid stars to map our galaxy, confirming the warping and showing that it’s even more prominent than expected. Image: J. Skowron/OGLE/U of Warsaw
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
6 years
I love these two images. Left: Hubble’s eXtreme Deep Field, the farthest-ever view of the universe showing a multitude of beautiful galaxies Right: Mock observation from the Illustris simulation, showing that simulations can capture the diversity & distribution of real galaxies
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
always the bridesmaid, never the highest priority job in the cluster queue 😔😔
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
I just arrived back in civilization after hiking through the Grand Canyon for several days, and *wow* it was incredible (as expected) and also fascinating! There’s crazy cool geologic, zoologic, and archaeologic history. 1/4
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Feeling a lil attacked
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Quarantine day 12: bought a ukulele. I am ukuKaley
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
Writing my thesis intro currently & look how cool this is: a 1785 map of the Milky Way drawn by astronomer William Herschel vs. the most complete map of the Milky Way to-date, the 2020 star map from Gaia
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
My latest hobby is doodling inspirational raccoons
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Why does biweekly sometimes mean every two weeks and sometimes mean twice a week. Why did we allow this to happen
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Small joy of the day: my moon phases spinner ring
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
Also I originally wanted to invent force fields so everyone could play outside without bugs landing on them, but as an adult I realize it definitely would've been hijacked by the military so ah well can't have anything fun
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
🚨paper day!🚨 Using stellar kinematics (e.g. from #GaiaDR3 ), can we identify stars that accreted into the Milky Way from tiny galaxies? Myself, @cosmichillarays , @alexanderpji , + investigate! Here, each frame represents simulated stars from a single ultra-faint dwarf galaxy:
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Put myself on an HR diagram
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
every time I see these sims I can’t help but see the accretion disk light as a nice black hole hat 🤠
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
1 year
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
y’alI I just estimated the carbon footprint of coal from Santa and it’s ~300,000 metric tons of CO2 every year!! that’s roughly equivalent to flying between NYC & Shanghai 640,000 times petition for Santa to stop giving lumps of coal and start giving solar panels
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
Trying out a new professional back-to-the-office look
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Forget N-body simulations. It’s all about N-buddy simulations now
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
core cusp problem who
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
2 years
Hi everyone, I'll be giving a dissertation talk Thursday 10 am at Session 420 of #AAS241 ! Come learn about the smallest galaxies that merged into the Milky Way ✨
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
The only thing getting me through grad school is knowing that, every few months (to years), I make a real nice plot
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
1 year
Mondralien coming down to Earth to appreciate art
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
Just realized that I am spending my break from studying for my astrophysics quals by watching astro videos on youtube. I’m so lucky to have a job that I forget is work.
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
6 years
My first two paintings for a series inspired by my research! Here is “Galaxy Merger” and “Neutron Star Merger”. They are based on a Hubble image and a digital drawing by Robin Dienel, respectively.
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
me drinking my iced coffee in december
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
ran some errands & then learned archery, call that hitting up Target
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
new paper to kick off #supernovaember ! 🎉🎉🎉 Where’d that gold in your jewelry come from? Many people think neutron stars 🤷‍♀️ but we’re here to say don’t discount collapsars (esp when talking about the oldest gold in the universe)! 💥 paper in a picture:
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
If you've ever heard you're "made of star-stuff", you have Margaret Burbidge to thank for that knowledge! She lead the foundational 108-page paper that discussed how heavy elements form in stars. She also turned 100 one week ago, so happy belated birthday Margaret! 😊🎂
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
4 years
my four pandemic states
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
3 years
gonna start promoting my research like I’m in business “we’re pivoting into an agile, data-driven integration of stars & gas. this paradigm shift will optimize synergies (of stars & gas) & disrupt the stellar industry (literally, we’re blowing up stars & gas)”
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
It’s come to my attention that almost no one has heard of laser bees?? The best-named asteroid deflection plan of all time??
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@kaleybrauer
Kaley Brauer 💫
5 years
The more I think about it, it seems like being a captain has more perks than being a phd anyway
@dcsqm9
David Smith, PhD
5 years
@kaleybrauer You need an awesome captain's hat.
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