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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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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northern rockhopper penguins are unreasonably glamorous
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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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Why properly document code while writing it when you can do it a year later, slowly and with great difficulty
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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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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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I love pictures of adaptive optics lasers because it always looks like we’re trying to blow up a planet
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How am I supposed to focus on work when this is sitting on my desk
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Happy Halloween!! This year’s overly niche costume: hello I’m a helium flash💥🌟🔥
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“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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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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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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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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.
@toomanyspectra
just defended her thesis in a basement with a piece of bamboo as her pointer, a legend
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Wouldn’t it be nice if academic papers had the occasional joke
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Me @ my qualifying exam
In other news, ya girl’s a PhD Candidate now!!!!
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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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Binary star system: don’t talk to me or my sun ever again
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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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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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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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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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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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I digitally painted a Hot Jupiter (open for a surprise?)
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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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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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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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thinking about Animals That Look Uncomfortably Like A Person In A Costume
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I listened to too many talks at 1.5x speed and now real life is slow & off-putting
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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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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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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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Time for my favorite method of studying: carrying my textbook around with me everywhere and never opening it
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Why do we call them vets when we could call them dogtors
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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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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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when no one else is using the cluster so I can just throw my inefficient scripts on all the cores
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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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Reading this astro textbook from 1931 and scientific illustrations have really gone downhill in the last century
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This gorgeous photo is by Tui de Roy!! World renowned photographer with a whole penguin book:
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This is why I dressed as a Messier object. It relates to my studies literally & figuratively
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My Bluetooth mouse died and now I’m on a forced break because this is how it charges 😐😑
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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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Caught on camera: live footage of me going through the motions of working but accomplishing nothing
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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 :)
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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my current favorite genre of pictures is Animals Being Interviewed
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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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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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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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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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always the bridesmaid, never the highest priority job in the cluster queue 😔😔
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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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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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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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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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🚨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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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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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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Forget N-body simulations. It’s all about N-buddy simulations now
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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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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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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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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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ran some errands & then learned archery, call that hitting up Target
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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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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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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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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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The more I think about it, it seems like being a captain has more perks than being a phd anyway
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