The Sun is rising over Cerro Armazones in #Chile!
And so does ESO's ELT: with the structure of one of the dome’s sliding doors now fully installed, construction on the dome of the telescope has reached its highest point.
The occasion also marks over 60% completion of the ELT. It was celebrated today at ESO's Headquarters in Garching, Germany, as well as at the ELT construction site in Chile!
Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann25002/
E. Garcés/ESO
That was fast
The paper I posted on monday about the simulation hypothesis
arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461
https://mastodon.social/@franco_vazza/114335432670575765
was cited this morning at a high energy neutrino conference 
(ok, in the wrong way perhaps, because the energetic KM3Net neutrino I used exactly to argue it's unlikely we live in a simulation, but whatever...)
(forwarded to me by a colleague, I was not there)
Ik heb een Wikipediapagina gemaakt over de Nederlandse sterrenkundige Nathalie Degenaar.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Degenaar
cc: @uva_amsterdam
Merging star clusters: For the first time, researchers have observed the fusion of star clusters in dwarf galaxies — a discovery made by chance through observations from the #Hubble space telescope.
Read more in our news article or check out the original study in #Nature:
https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/newsroom/2025/celestial-spectacle-witnessed/
Verschmelzende Sternhaufen: Forscher:innen konnten erstmals die Fusion von Sternhaufen in Zwerggalaxien beobachten. Es handelte sich dabei um einen Zufallsfund in Beobachtungen des #Hubble-Weltraumteleskops.
Mehr dazu in unserem Newsbeitrag oder dem dazugehörigen #Nature-Paper.
https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/newsroom/2025/himmlisches-schauspiel-beobachtet/
Do you know that this "simple" experiment has changed things forever in #physics ?
Super easy to replicate: a wire crossed by a current is a source of magnetic fields!
Danish physicists Hans Christian Oersted discovered that in 1820, than a few years later André-Marie Ampère gave a mathematical formulation to it (in what is now one of Maxwell's law).
Going to show this today to engineering students, hope they are fascinated as I still am about this.
This is NGC 1514 aka the Crystal Ball Nebula -- a planetary nebula -- newly imaged by #JWST
It's in the #constellation #Taurus which we covered in Season 1: https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/taurus-the-bull/
#Constellations #Taurus #Zodiac #Astrophotography #space #science #NASA #Webb #AstroDon #podcast
Almost the Center of our Galaxy
-----------------------------------------------
I really wanted to get as close as possible to the milky way center as possible for my latitude.
This was as close to the horizon as possible before dawn.
It was worth the struggle of waking up at 3:30 AM at this remote location, because I got to test my new portable wide-angle setup for the first time :)
All details: https://app.astrobin.com/u/Kassar?i=8h9azy
Normal people: Let's count in base 10
Computer scientists: Let's count in base 2
Astronomers: Let's count in base 26!
#astrodon #astronomy #supernova
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/ban-447-wait-how-many-supernova-explode
Half of the universe's hydrogen gas, long unaccounted for, has been found
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-universe-hydrogen-gas-unaccounted.html
"The cosmic microwave background is in the back of everything we see in the universe. It's the edge of the observable universe [...] So you can use that as a backlight to see where the gas is."
I haven't had to make a poster for an acedemic conference in years, what tools are people using these days? #academicchatter #astrodon
"The eye of Sauron" in this new VLBI observation of the jet in a candidate high energy neutrino accelerator on #astroph today:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09287
"Looking into the Jet Cone of the Neutrino-Associated Very High Energy Blazar PKS 1424+240"
by Kovalev et al.
In the UK, you can now watch @Chrislintott and I do our best version of Ted Lasso and talk about football (soccer) and potentially hazardous asteroids. In particular, we were chatting about the case of 2024 YR4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002b26m #astrodon #2024YR4
Behold the Pink Moon.
You’ll note, of course, that it’s not pink. “Pink” is just the name for the moon in April. This one I captured with the ASI678MC. The full disk fits pretty nicely with the Askar FRA400 + 678, though I do need to worry more about it drifting out of frame sooner.
Best 35% of 500 images, 2x drizzle, stacked & sharpened in PlanetarySystemStacker, edited in Affinity Photo (levels, curves, etc.).
Sterrenkundige Inga Kamp is de nieuwe directeur van het Kapteyn Instituut van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Ze volgt Léon Koopmans op. Kamp is aangesteld voor een periode van drie jaar.
https://www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/inga-kamp-nieuwe-directeur-groningse-sterrenkundigen-4498
Official account of NOVA/astronomie.nl. We mainly post news, public events and Ph.D. ceremonies.
Officieel account van NOVA/astronomie.nl. We posten vooral over nieuws, publieksactiviteiten en promotie-plechtigheden.
Recommended reading 
Recent post on astrobites.org about a paper led by a PhD student from our institute.
The Black Hole Tango: Kicks and Spins in Hierarchical Mergers
“The room is large and densely packed. As you twirl across the floor, someone extends their hand, inviting you to dance. The two of you spin around each other, the tension building with every step. As you draw closer and closer, you realize this isn’t a ballroom, and you’re not people. This is outer space, and you and your partner are black holes, spiraling toward one another in one of the most energetic events in the universe: a black hole merger. (…)”
https://astrobites.org/2025/04/07/gw_kicks_impact_bh_spins_in_hierarchical_mergers/
#paperday Want to start the week with a fresh paper which clearly thinks outside of the box? 
Here you go
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461
"Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe: why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation"
Will do a paper explainer in the near future...
Are you into fishing? The "fishing rods" in this image are a tad bigger than the ones you may be used to 
In this image of our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile, huge cranes appear to be fishing for construction materials around the telescope.
Inside the dome is the telescope's main structure, which will eventually hold the telescope's mirrors, including its huge 39-m primary mirror.
Learn more about the ELT here: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2515a/
ESO
