zoe hackshaw
space cowgirl (UTAustin Astronomy Ph.D. candidate) & investigator of Galactic origins🔎💫🔭🧘♀️🤠🪩 UF alum🫶🏼 zoehackshaw.github.io
- Reposted by zoe hackshawNicole’s second paper shows a Milky Way–mass FIRE-2 galaxy forms an α-bimodality without major mergers or strong radial migration! Dilution events and inside-out growth open the gap, hinting the Galaxy’s chemical split may stem from quiet evolution. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14897 🔭☄️
- Reposted by zoe hackshawCongratulations @theastrozo.bsky.social, on your paper! It's always great to see a Gaia Data-related paper. With the PISI team dedicated to it, this means a lot to us at UNIDIA. It is especially meaningful here, given that P. Panuzzo, the main author and discoverer of BH3, is part of the team.
- A red giant star orbiting a black hole 33 times the mass of our Sun... why? ... HOW? In my most recent paper, we try to answer this question using chemistry. Follow along on a Detailed Chemical Analysis of the Red Giant Orbiting Gaia BH3: From Lithium to Thorium➡️ iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
- 🥳 🔭 🧪 #astrosci
- A red giant star orbiting a black hole 33 times the mass of our Sun... why? ... HOW? In my most recent paper, we try to answer this question using chemistry. Follow along on a Detailed Chemical Analysis of the Red Giant Orbiting Gaia BH3: From Lithium to Thorium➡️ iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
- A red giant star orbiting a black hole 33 times the mass of our Sun... why? ... HOW? In my most recent paper, we try to answer this question using chemistry. Follow along on a Detailed Chemical Analysis of the Red Giant Orbiting Gaia BH3: From Lithium to Thorium➡️ iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
- The red giant in this system is metal-poor ([Fe/H] = -2.27), alpha rich, and slightly r-process enhanced. I obtained ~45 hours of observations on this star using the 2.7m telescope at McDonald Observatory to produce the highest SNR spectrum to date and search for some of the most elusive elements🔭
- We derived 29 chemical abundances of this star. This system likely formed from one of the following scenarios: - Isolated Binary Evolution -- these objects were born together or - Dynamical Capture -- these objects were unassociated then became bound later Chemistry may help solve this!
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View full threadWe find no chemical peculiarities in BH3*. The chemical "normalcy” of this star is consistent with both formation theories for Gaia BH3, including dynamical capture and isolated binary evolution. Many more systems of this kind are anticipated to be discovered with the coming release of Gaia DR4!
- Reposted by zoe hackshawIt's Friday, and apparently bluesky is ready for this fun revelation: Dinosaurs lived on the other side the Galaxy.
- Reposted by zoe hackshawa NEW PAPER led the incomparable Dr. Elizabeth Iles (accepted by PASA) quantifies how astronomers might be biased in how they judge galactic bars Turns out that male astronomers are consistently more optimistic than their peers when it comes to measuring length arxiv.org/abs/2511.09908 #astro
- Reposted by zoe hackshawProud of the work I published with @djphysicswebb.bsky.social . Gender Gap in intro physics is eliminated when employing retake exams because women do better on the FIRST try - suggesting exam STAKES (not differences in preparation/understanding) explain gender gap. 🧪 link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawThis is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important
- ⚠️ Chinese researchers have invented bone glue that mimics how oysters stick to surfaces underwater. The adhesive can reportedly repair orthopedic fractures in 2-3 minutes, even in blood-rich environments, and is bioabsorbable. interestingengineering.com/science/chin...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawScience news article about 2nd year grad students being unceremoniously dropped from the GRFP eligibility with no explanation or warning: www.science.org/content/arti...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawCecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:
- Funding science is very important for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that you get papers like this
- Reposted by zoe hackshawthe semester is starting! here are some of my teaching resources online: intro astronomy animations: zingale.github.io/astro_animat... my computational astrophysics class: zingale.github.io/computationa... my computational hydro text: open-astrophysics-bookshelf.github.io/numerical_ex... #astro
- finished project hail mary by andy weir! i loved it! &as someone that doesn’t consume astrophysical fiction ✨ “Do you believe in God? […] I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing […] The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe”
- Reposted by zoe hackshawHeard the latest news from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration? We detected the collision of the most massive pair of black holes so far: #GW231123 weighing in at ~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun! So to celebrate, here’s a handy chart ✨ Just how chonky are these black holes? 🤔
- Reposted by zoe hackshawFrom Mckenzie Ferrari: Follow along as we zoom through the stars with these hypervelocity stellar survivors and uncover their explosive origins. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/07/22/h...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawToday is a big day for us: it's DATA RELEASE DAY!!! And to celebrate our nineteenth data release, we have not one, but two papers for you to read all about our data: we have a DR19 paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.07093) and an SDSS-V Overview paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.06989) #DR19
- Reposted by zoe hackshawFrom Caroline von Raesfeld: Today’s bite explores if we’ll be able to find a star that has formed from the gas enriched by only one stellar predecessor, an interesting way to probe what’s actually happening in stellar nucleosynthesis. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/07/08/l...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawNASA is erasing much of its progress towards inclusivity — a shameful change that goes against everything astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride worked for. My review of the new biopic SALLY, for @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪🚀👩🚀🏳️🌈
- Reposted by zoe hackshawToday for @blackinastro.bsky.social's theme of #ShareTheUniverse for 🪐 Black in Space Week 🔭, we have two very special interview articles with black astronomers Logan White and Phoenix-Avery Sarian! Summaries for each article and links in the thread below ⬇️!
- Reposted by zoe hackshawHow do astronomers decide that objects to observe? You and your students can now map the cosmos with our new card game. We've distributed copies of to several SDSS institutions and anyone can download and print their own copy from the link below voyages.sdss.org/hands-on-act...
- in appreciation and solidarity of our national parks, some pictures of my January big bend trip🏜️the beauty, knowledge, and community the parks bring truly cannot be stated enough. and half the park is after dark!🔭
- Reposted by zoe hackshawTired of wondering which atomic lines are in your spectra? You need: *whose line is it anyway?* An interactive tool for identifying atomic spectral lines. 🧪🔭 #stars install: pip install whoseline source: github.com/bmorris3/who...
- Reposted by zoe hackshawMUTUAL AID ALERT: Stand with our community in Astro+ adjacent fields impacted by the attack on DEIA, support our community by giving aid through our GoFundMe. See links in thread! - choir collab, @blackinastro.bsky.social, Astro Poverty Survey Team, MVMT Consulting @dranicole.bsky.social)
- Reposted by zoe hackshawSo glad I decided to get out of my comfort zone to try one of the feeds (Science by @bossett.social). Immediately shown cool stuff like this paper that introduced me to the coolest job ever of "Galactic archaeology". How much do I understand? Maybe 10%. Am I fascinated? 100%.
- hi bluesky! interrupting to show you my first first-author paper that has just been published 🤸♀️ iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... This work is titled [X/Fe] Marks the Spot: Mapping Chemical Azimuthal Variations in the Galactic Disk with APOGEE ( @sdssurveys.bsky.social ) 🗺️ Let's get into it 🧵
- Reposted by zoe hackshawAlthough NOAA's page on atmospheric CO2 levels has vanished, you can still get this vital information from Ralph Keeling's team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego keelingcurve.ucsd.edu Please follow bsky.app/profile/keel... for updates and share Don't let science be hidden
- Have you ever wondered what it looks like when an astronomer starts up a 2.7m telescope for the night? Wonder no more 🔭
- Reposted by zoe hackshaw🔭 Our Gaia telescope has revealed two mysterious objects: a huge exoplanet & a brown dwarf, both orbiting low-mass stars, a scenario thought to be extremely rare. This is the first time a planet has been discovered by Gaia’s ability to sense wobbling stars 👉 esa.int/Science_Expl...
- Reposted by zoe hackshaw[This post could not be retrieved]
- 🔭 don't miss out on our investigation on the Galactic disk, mapping chemical azimuthal variations🗺️
- hi bluesky! interrupting to show you my first first-author paper that has just been published 🤸♀️ iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... This work is titled [X/Fe] Marks the Spot: Mapping Chemical Azimuthal Variations in the Galactic Disk with APOGEE ( @sdssurveys.bsky.social ) 🗺️ Let's get into it 🧵
- Reposted by zoe hackshawYou've probably heard that "we are stardust," but this graphic breaks it down and tells you what kind of stars your dust came from--and which elements didn't come from stars at all. 🧪 svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13873/
