Francesca Fragkoudi
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astrofrancesca.bsky.social
Francesca Fragkoudi
@astrofrancesca.bsky.social
690 followers 210 following 74 posts
Astrophysicist | Associate Professor & UKRI FLF at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham | Interested in: galaxies; dynamics; bars; dark matter; science4peace; cats; (not necessarily in that order) | Cypriot #κυπραία #kıbrıslı
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astrofrancesca.bsky.social
Cakes for Good: an initiative by Durham astronomy's wonderful PhD students reported on in Nature 🤩
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Cake to the rescue: how these PhD students are cooking up a sense of community
One treat at a time, these graduate students are helping to raise funds for charitable organizations.
www.nature.com
October 22, 2025 at 8:19 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Astronomers have detected a dark blob of...something, billions of light years away. It's as massive as a million Suns & it emits no detectable radiation.

It might be a clump of dark matter, revealing new details about the structure of the invisible universe. 🧪🔭

www.ucdavis.edu/news/astrono...
Left, our best surface brightness model of the 1.7-GHz global VLBI observation used here, which has been reconvolved with the main lobe of the interferometer’s point spread function and added to the residuals (34 μJy per beam r.m.s.). For reference, red contours show the surface brightness at 2.1 μm observed by the W. M. Keck Observatory adaptive optics system30. The positions of two low-mass perturbers are each marked with a black X. The 2 × 108 M⊙ object first detected by ref. 24 is labelled , and the 1.13 × 106 M⊙ detection reported here is labelled . The zoomed-in region shown in the right-hand two panels is indicated by the black square, which has a side length of 60 mas. Top right, detail of the bright arc around , with the colour scale modified to emphasize the gap in the arc produced by the gravitational perturbation of . Bottom right, GI corrections to the lensing convergence (expressed in units of lens-plane surface mass density), showing a compact, positive feature whose position and mass are consistent with the independent parametric modelling results for . The dashed black circle has a radius of 80 pc and the lensed emission is indicated by the black contours.
October 9, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
8minutesold.bsky.social
Paper day! My PhD student Mariana Júlio, with @readdark.bsky.social, @pengfeili.bsky.social and others, studies the internal dynamics of dwarf galaxies and finds they don't agree with the Radial Acceleration Relation, challenging the dark matter alternative MOND.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.06905

🔭☄️🧪
1/7
The radial acceleration relation at the EDGE of galaxy formation: testing its universality in low-mass dwarf galaxies
A tight correlation between the baryonic and observed acceleration of galaxies has been reported over a wide range of mass ($10^8 < M_{\rm bar}/{\rm M}_\odot < 10^{11}$) - the Radial Acceleration Rela...
arxiv.org
October 9, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
exgaltwin.bsky.social
🌌 Yesterday, the Durham Advanced School on Astrophysical Simulations kicked off at Durham University! PhD students and researchers are diving into both theoretical and practical aspects of astrophysical simulations. Big thanks to the Institute of Computational Simulations for organizing! 🙏
September 16, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
exgaltwin.bsky.social
The wait is over! Next week the Durham Advanced School on Astrophysical Simulations kicks off at @durhamuniversity.bsky.social We’re finalizing preparations for this international event with 50 students and ~12 lecturers 👩‍💻👨‍🏫 Big thanks to the DU-ICC for hosting!
📸 More updates and photos coming soon!
September 11, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
profsera.bsky.social
As a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW) I support our statement on the war in Gaza.

www.knaw.nl/en/news/stat...
Statement by the KNAW Board on the situation in Gaza - KNAW
The KNAW Board calls on the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science to actively press for suspension of Israel’s participation in the EU’s Horizon Europe programme for scientific and scholarl...
www.knaw.nl
September 11, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
astro4edu.bsky.social
From using Arduino to simulate exoplanet transits (perfect for older students fond of technology) to exploring lightning on other planets, and wrapping up with a tactile Jupiter experience designed for younger children: This is the astroEDU summer collection of activities 2025! 1/4 🔭 #astroedu
Announcement card vor the astroEDU summer 2025 activities collection with three images showing electonics, a tactile Jupiter and a person rubbing a styrofoam container
August 15, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
profsera.bsky.social
Great article about the importance of software engineering and open source code in astrophysics 🔭🧪 (and if anyone is keen to work with me on #BlackHoles lmk, I am planning to hire a software engineer soon!) 😊

www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/12/a...
A Stellar Revolution: How Open-Source Tool MESA Changed the Way We Study Stars
A Stellar Revolution: How Open-Source Tool MESA Changed the Way We Study Stars on Simons Foundation
www.simonsfoundation.org
August 14, 2025 at 1:58 PM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
Last month we had the privilege of having Durham U's Chancellor, Dr Fiona Hill, record the narration for a new VR movie we're developing about the life of our Milky Way, using the new Auriga Superstars simulations 🔭☄️✨
We're really excited to share this soon with you all 👀
#astronomy #astrosci
durham.ac.uk Durham University @durham.ac.uk · Jul 11
Our astronomers are developing a virtual reality movie to inspire children from North East England and beyond to be curious about science and the cosmos. Our Chancellor, Dr Fiona Hill, has recorded the voiceover for the movie which will premiere later this year! Watch this space…

#NAM2025
A woman wearing headphones and holding a piece of paper sits in front of a microphone in a recording studio.
August 13, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
royalsociety.org
Astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge FRS was born #OnThisDay in 1919. During her long career she helped originate the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, discovered the most distant astronomical object known at the time, and helped develop instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope.

#WomenInSTEM #Space
August 12, 2025 at 3:10 PM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
oh dear, scary, but good to know since I often use google for quick calculations and unit conversions 😱
redshiftless.bsky.social John Forbes @redshiftless.bsky.social · Aug 4
PSA to scientists: Google calculator appears to no longer do basic unit conversion correctly!

n.b. the correct answer here is 223.4 Myr, a factor of about 60 larger than Google's answer.

🔭 🧪
A screenshot of a google search result for "2*pi*(8 kpc)/(220 km/s)" which is roughly the time it takes the Sun to go around the Galaxy. In the screenshot, google's calculator has popped up and parsed the expression correctly, but then returns the result 3 899 243.9 years, and answer which is off by 2 orders of magnitude.
August 6, 2025 at 12:25 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
alexji.bsky.social
We’ve got a new zooniverse program called Dwarf Quest! Help us find members of our Milky Way’s galactic entourage in data from the Dark Energy Camera
www.zooniverse.org/projects/ywy...
Zooniverse
The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.
www.zooniverse.org
August 5, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
rami.spaceaustralia.com
So something @stilgherrian.com shared earlier caught my eye and I did some reading.

Apparently, SpaceX is lodged a complaint with the FCC that another company, AST, is putting to many satellites into orbit.

First and foremost, let's get this out of the way ... fuckin lolz. They have no shame.

1/n
Letter from SpaceX that is complaining to FCC about AST.
August 3, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
jimalkhalili.bsky.social
🧪Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows

From nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows
First major attempt to chart researchers’ views finds interpretations in conflict.
www.nature.com
July 30, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
astroroyalscot.bsky.social
Big day for the matriarchy! 🥳 Huge congrats to the awesome Prof. Doughtery, lead on the Jupiter-bound ESA JUICE mission & STFC Exec Chair.

If anyone's confused on the astro royal hierarchy: Michele and I are the astro equivalents of 🇬🇧Westminster and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Holyrood 🤗

ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 👩‍🔬🔭🧪
UK gets first female Astronomer Royal in 350 years
Prof Michele Dougherty is the first woman to be appointed to the influential post.
www.bbc.co.uk
July 30, 2025 at 5:22 AM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
Our sister institute at Durham, the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, are advertising for a five year lectureship position 🔭☄️
Advertisement is here, have a look and come join us in pretty Durham: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...
#astrosci
Lecturer in Observational Astronomy (Research %26 Education)
Click the link provided to see the complete job description.
durham.taleo.net
July 21, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
mcmillan-astro.bsky.social
🔭 Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, UK astronomy version. Inspired by a comment from LOC chair David Alexander at #NAM2025 🔭
Sgt Pepper Beatles in NAM 2025 group photo
July 15, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
mbkplus.bsky.social
I have a lot of thoughts here, but the most basic one is that it's insane that we've allowed people to get so rich that they can basically fund this with their own money while at the same time not providing any real mechanism for governmental oversight or regulation.
peark.es George Pearkes @peark.es · Jul 14
Some absolutely insane numbers here.
zuck 1m For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this. zuck 1m SemiAnalysis just reported that Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online. 💪 zuck 1m We're actually building several multi-GW clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. zuck 1m Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!
July 14, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
nam25-durham.bsky.social
DAY 3 #NAM2025durham 🌟

Midweek at #NAM2025 brings one of our busiest days of sessions! Join us for these special events:
🎨 Artwork unveiling in OCW including dance and poetry performances
🎲 board games night in the TLC

And reminder to vote for most engaging exhibitor by 5pm!
July 9, 2025 at 8:14 AM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
My awesome PhD student 🤩
durham.ac.uk Durham University @durham.ac.uk · Jul 8
The @royalastrosoc.bsky.social @nam25-durham.bsky.social is a chance for our students to hear from leading astronomers and share their own research. PhD student Martyna Winiarska says that taking part in NAM is what being a researcher is all about 👉 durham-student.org/national-ast...

#NAM2025
A woman with curly hair and wearing university graduation robes and a hat smiles at the camera.
July 8, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
durham.ac.uk
We're excited to be hosting almost 1,000 leading space scientists at the @royalastrosoc.bsky.social ‪National Astronomy Meeting #NAM2025 next week, 7 to 11 July! Leading up to NAM, discover more about our amazing research into the mysteries of the Universe 👉 www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...
A montage of space related images including a simulation of the cosmic web, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and people looking up at the Milky Way in the night sky.
July 2, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
funfactscience.com
Still confused by all the fuss about our new interstellar visitor? check out this new explainer by @astrokirsten.bsky.social ☄️🔭🧪
theconversation.com/astronomers-...
Astronomers have spied an interstellar object zooming through the Solar System
An object dubbed 3I/ATLAS is only the third interloper from outside the Solar System seen in all of human history.
theconversation.com
July 4, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Reposted by Francesca Fragkoudi
emily.space
Finding out about Gaia at #EAS2025Cork! ☄️

Just announced: Gaia DR4 will be released in December 2026!
A photo of the slide with the December 2026 release date
June 26, 2025 at 2:11 PM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
am I... the only person who likes the game of "submit to arXiv at exact time to be first"? 👀
I totally understanding those who don't want to play it and submit at any time. I always go through the whole list anyway, or lately tend to use something like benty-fields which sorts the papers for me
vicgrinberg.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy Dr. Victoria Grinberg @vicgrinberg.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · Jun 24
Whoa... With the new software (so pretty soon) the #arxiv order will be randomized. No more race to rhe first to submit on a given day!

#Astrodon #eas2025
June 25, 2025 at 10:27 AM
astrofrancesca.bsky.social
allowing myself a small moment of pride to say that I'm really happy to have been promoted to associate professor 😊
June 24, 2025 at 2:10 PM