Before being locked in a basement at the TNG offices for two days of WEAVE Science Processing & Analysis meeting (my first as part of the CASU team!), I managed to check out the southernmost tip of La Palma 🌋

Nice view of the Sun 🌞 today from @cambridgeastro.bsky.social - thanks to Robin Catchpole 🔭

Such a good view for a meeting room, and the view at the dinner was amazing too 😍 @ Pristine collaboration meeting, Nice Observatory @obscoteazur.bsky.social

For a recent outreach talk I created this visualisation of real stellar spectra (from the LAMOST survey) - showing a metal-rich, a very metal-poor, and a carbon-enhanced very metal-poor star with similar temperatures (~5000K). Look at those massive molecular carbon bands for the CEMP star! ✨🔭

I love singing with the #Cambridge University Gospel #Choir 😍 so enjoyed our concert at Great St Mary’s tonight! 🎶

Having fun with a CD spectroscope and my old office desk lamp! Getting ready for the school kids visiting later this week for International Women’s Day ✨ 🔭

Paper now published! 🎉 There are two fun new figures, showing how carbon-enhanced stars are offset from normal stars in the CMD (not a new result, but neat to see with this data) ✨ academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...
(incl. mention to colour in figure descriptions...)

Having a wonderful time at #IAUS395, the “Stellar Populations in the Milky Way and Beyond” symposium in Paraty, Brazil 🤩 Both scientifically and otherwise a great meeting, celebrating the career of Beatrice Barbuy 🔭✨

🔭🌟 Paper day! We're using the low-res Gaia XP spectra to derive metallicities and carbon abundances, focusing on metal-poor, *very* carbon-rich stars! These probe binary interactions & the very First Stars. Here are a few of the highlight figures (see alt text for details) arxiv.org/abs/2410.11077

I had to look twice when I spotted this drycleaners shop in Tauranga, NZ! I wonder who designed their Pristine logo first 🤔✨🧺

Never thought the first time I’d see the aurora would be from my bedroom window in Cambridge!! 🤩🤩

Accepted version now on arXiv 🎉🤩 With a few new figures, supporting our previous findings: evidence for two distinct halo components in the inner few kpc of the Galaxy - one faster rotating & lower dispersion, and a more diffuse, almost stationary component arxiv.org/abs/2312.03847

3) comparing with other studies of the ancient (inner) Milky Way, we interpret this confined, slightly rotating metal-poor population as a mix of early large Galactic building blocks (more important at higher metallicity) and smaller accretion events (lower metallicity). [4/5]

2) we also find that Galactic rotation decreases with metallicity, but that the most metal-poor stars do have some net rotation (~ 40 km/s) around the Galactic centre. [3/5]

In this paper, we study (what we believe to be) the oldest stars in the Milky Way. We find that 1) many of the most metal-poor stars are very confined to the inner region of our Galaxy. 60% of the VMP stars currently there never go beyond 5 kpc from the centre! [2/5]

🔭 Paper day! "🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷: Characterising the orbital properties of the ancient, very metal-poor inner Milky Way" - arxiv.org/abs/2312.03847 - it's been years in the making, & I'm so relieved to have submitted it! A short paper thread: [1/5]

🔭 We suggest that many of the previous identifications of “discy VMP stars” in the Milky Way could  be explained by the presence of a prograde halo population, and find no evidence of a significant VMP disc population (in our sample). There are some nice figures in the paper, including this one:

It’s been a couple of weeks since I get to carry this r-process-enhanced ring on my finger! Happy to have merged with my binary companion 🥰