Ryan White
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astroryan.bsky.social
Ryan White
@astroryan.bsky.social
1.3K followers 440 following 400 posts
Astrophysics student at Macquarie University, retired artist, bread obsessed. Studying cool (but actually quite hot) stars 🌟 @astrobites.bsky.social author 🪐 i have art too! @ryanwhiteartist.bsky.social 🖌️
ryanwhite1.github.io
(he/him)
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astroryan.bsky.social
To finish it off, I've also done an annotated version of the paper complete with silly drawings and accessible language! These are inspired by @clairelamman.bsky.social , and you can read this and more here: ryanwhite1.github.io/wolf-rayet.h...
4/4 ⚛️🔭🧪
The first page of my annotated paper on Apep. The scientific paper is greyed out, and there is purple text superimposed along with large drawings of stars orbiting each other.
November 19, 2025 at 10:18 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
Both my and our team's companion papers are also published in ApJ today! Take a read for all of your Apep needs:

My paper: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Yinuo Han's paper: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
3/? ⚛️🔭🧪
A screenshot of the first page of my paper titled 'The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding Wind Nebula'
November 19, 2025 at 10:15 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
We have modelled the 3D geometry of the nebula better than ever before, learning about the Wolf-Rayet binary orbit and confirming that there is a third star (an blue supergiant) in the system too! 2/? ⚛️🔭🧪
November 19, 2025 at 10:10 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
the artist:
A screenshot of a Jupyter Notebook cell, showing multi-coloured computer code filling the screen. The image is intended to look very complicated with all of the Python code and notable lack of any commenting.
October 1, 2025 at 3:52 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
The art:
A scientific visualisation showing the structure of a colliding wind binary. There is a large spiral, showing anti-clockwise motion, with several labels for key features of the spiral. There are two concentric bow shocks, labels indicating that the outer shock is the '1st' and the inner shock is the '2nd'. Labels point to the leading and trailing edge of each shock according to the wrapping motion. There is an inset for the central region of the image, showing that there are two stars at its centre.
October 1, 2025 at 3:51 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
anyway here's the .png export from powerpoint in question
a digital artwork of two jellyfish in the open ocean, of species Chrysaora hysoscella., as drawn by me in Microsoft Powerpoint. The jellyfish have round bodies, with dark stripes on their hemispherical body, with both long stringy tendrils and also broader softer tendrils (sorry I don't know the technical terms lol). They are orange and light brown against a deep blue background.
September 14, 2025 at 5:57 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
we need to bring back newspapers on the train. i read only the hardest hitting journalism on my morning commute, thanks to @bencollins.bsky.social
A well-dressed man (if i do say so myself) reads a ‘The Onion’ newspaper on a Sydney metro train. There are other people on the train, on their phones. The man reading the newspaper looks to be deep in thought
August 5, 2025 at 12:44 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
i’ve never seen so many people in one place as i did today while marching over the sydney harbour bridge. end the genocide now.
there are tens of thousands of people filling a several lane road going over the sydney harbour bridge (centre of frame). it is raining heavily, and most people are wearing raincoats or using umbrellas. there are several palestinian flags being waved.
August 3, 2025 at 5:54 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
It's my understanding that the very pretty VLT ESO PR image of Apep had some Gaussian blur applied. As for the raw VISIR data, you can see some very slight indication of bumpiness in the nebula, but you're dealing with a different PSF, a less sensitive detector, etc
A (very slightly processed) image of the Apep nebula, taken in 2018 with the VLT VISIR instrument. There are three stars at the centre of the image (seen in two sprites of light), with a coil-like shell of dust encircling them. You can see some noise in the pixels around the shell, and some very slight evidence of flocculation in the nebula. This image is centred on emission at 8.72 microns (mid-infrared).
July 31, 2025 at 2:57 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
not a bad effort! god i love australian music
A screenshot of my Hottest 100 of australian music votes. Powderfinger - My Happiness, got 6th Gang of Youths - Magnolia, 42 The Middle East - Blood, no ranking The Veronicas - Untouched, 3 AC/DC - Thunderstruck, 13 Angus & Julia Stone - Big Jet Plane, 20 The Church - The Unguarded Moment, 75 :( INXS - Need You Tonight, 59 Hunters & Collectors - Throw Your Arms Around Me, 25 Ball Park Music - It’s Nice To Be Alive, 49
July 26, 2025 at 11:32 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
All of this is possible because of continued imaging of the system with the VLT, allowing us to figure out the expansion rate and inner structure of the nebula. Take a look at the below gif to see it expanding before our eyes!
Apep is truly a unique system, and stay tuned for more to come! 5/5 🔭🧪
July 22, 2025 at 12:04 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
Our team also has another paper today, led by Yinuo Han, analysing the dust properties and proper motion. Yinuo has revealed that the binary orbit takes ~193 years to complete - almost an order of magnitude longer than the next longest period system - Apep is special! 4/5 🔭🧪
arxiv.org/abs/2507.14498
A three-panel figure, showing the Apep nebula in three different wavelengths. The top panel is centred on a 7.7 micron wavelength, the middle 15 microns, and the bottom 25.5 microns. Each image is false colour -- since monochromatic images are taken with mid-infrared photons -- and are coloured for aesthetic purposes. Yinuo points out in this figure various regions of interest in the coil nebula that are useful for our study.
July 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
One of the main findings in this work is that we have shown that there is definitely a third (supergiant) star in the Apep system, as evidenced by a cavity it sculpts in the nebula as it expands past the supergiant star... 3/? 🔭🧪
There are four panels of a scientific figure and a caption below it. The top left panel of the mosaic shows a real image of the coil-shaped Apep nebula from the Very Large Telescope in the infrared. This is a monochromatic image that has been coloured red/yellow. The other three panels show simulated images of this nebula. The top right panel shows a bright region of simulated dust in the upper regions of the coil which are not seen in the real image. The bottom left panel has a cone overlaid on it (originating from the image centre with the flat face angled towards the top right), showing that the simulated image can be more realistic if we don't simulate the dust that is within the cone. The bottom right panel shows the simulated coil nebula without a chunk in the top right, which appears to better match the real image in the top left. Figure caption: Figure 3. An illustration of the cavity carved by the northern O star companion in the Apep system. The WR+WR binary is the central bright point, while the northern companion is the smaller point source 0.7” to the north. Top left: The innermost shell of the Apep nebula observed with VLT/VISIR, processed as in Section A.2. Top right: Previous models with no dust destruction effects from the northern companion overestimate the dust luminosity in the upper region of the plume. Bottom left: We model dust destruction along the volume of a cone extending out of the WR+WR central engine along the line-of-sight vector to the northern companion. Bottom right: With the addition of this region of dust destruction, the model geometry now more closely matches what we see with direct imaging (top left).
July 22, 2025 at 11:52 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
Apep is a colliding wind nebula; it's the only system in the Galaxy with two Wolf-Rayet stars* whose winds collide and form shells of dust in each orbit. Our new JWST is the first time that the 4 latest shells of dust have been seen, and these shells help us fit the orbit of the binary... 2/? 🔭🧪
July 22, 2025 at 11:44 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610

We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪
The image shows a false-colour image of the Apep colliding wind nebula as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the mid-infrared. In the centre of the image, there is an orange-coloured spiral coil of dust, not dissimilar in shape from a snail's shell. There are two concentric repeats of the coil that are larger and encompass the inner shell, and these further out shells of dust are coloured red and get dimmer as they get further from the centre of the image. These far out coils of dust look somewhat like translucent spheres. At the very centre of the image is a small spikey object which are the three stars in Apep that create and hide behind the dust shells. There are stars scattered throughout the image, each with a snowflake-like 'point spread function' that spreads the central brightness of the stars into diffraction spikes. Image credit: Shashank Dholakia for R M T White et al 2025. 'The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula'. PI: Yinuo Han.
July 22, 2025 at 11:38 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
live view of me trying to understand and edit a 50000+ line code (it is written in fortran) [the documentation is in french] {lord help me}
There is a golden retriever dog sitting at a desk in front of a computer. The dog is wearing cute circular glasses and a plaid shirt. On the computer screen is an open VSCode window, implying that the dog is writing code. They look at the camera longingly, clearly needing help for their current predicament.
July 1, 2025 at 10:19 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
Spotted a little sliver of the 22° sun halo over Sydney yesterday afternoon. A cool result of sunlight refracting through the ice crystals in those cirrus clouds!
The Sun is to the left of centre of the frame, a bright rainbow pattern is almost in the very centre of the image which is refracted light through the cirrus clouds near the horizon. There is a dimmer halo at the same angular separation around the rest of the Sun. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is in the right of the image. The Sun is to the left of centre of the frame, a bright rainbow pattern is in the right of the image which is refracted light through the cirrus clouds near the horizon.
June 23, 2025 at 1:45 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
TIL the Sydney Harbour Bridge is largely based off of a somewhat smaller but still huge bridge in NYC (the Hell Gate bridge)
the Sydney Harbour Bridge - a very tall and long arch bridge with two pylons at each side. the North Sydney CBD is visible behind the bridge, and the Sydney Harbour underneath it the Hell Gate bridge fills the frame, with large pylons at each end of the bridge. the bridge, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is a large steel arch, although construction finished on this bridge over a decade before the Sydney Harbour Bridge was finished. the steel structure is littered with red paint. there is a group of people in the foreground playing cricket (?).
June 3, 2025 at 11:09 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
a screenshot of a tumblr post that reads “kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chatgpt to do it”
May 25, 2025 at 2:27 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
These dusty nebulae are created by the colliding winds of massive stars that are in close proximity. The dust gets wrapped into an intricate spiral as the two stars orbit their common centre of mass, and each orbit of the star gives us another rung in those concentric nebulae
2/3 🔭
May 20, 2025 at 11:19 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
Four more colliding wind nebulae have been observed with JWST, and just yesterday put on the arxiv! arxiv.org/abs/2505.11616
Yes, those rungs of dust are real and not an imaging artefact!
1/ 🔭
A four paneled figure, showing the different Wolf-Rayet colliding wind binaries WR48a, WR112, WR125, and WR137 (left->right, top->down) as observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. There are scale bars in the bottom left corner of each image showing how large 25000 astronomical units is compared to each nebula at their respective (estimated) distance. Each panel shows a bright spikey feature at the centre of each nebula (this is the two binary stars that power the nebula), surrounded by concentric rungs of dust that manifest as a bumpy diffuse structure. Source: Richardson et al (2025).
May 20, 2025 at 11:15 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
happy to say that my cool looking poster won a cool award (best masters poster!) at an Australian Institute of Physics Poster Presentation event yesterday :)
A picture of a tall and smartly dressed man (if I do say so myself), standing next to a large academic poster. The poster is mostly dark green with bright text, in a retro computer aesthetic. The poster’s title reads: “xenomorph: the fastest way to model the colliding winds of massive stars”. There are various images and QR codes on the poster, notably one of the colliding wind binary ‘Apep’. Me standing on a stage with a microphone in hand, giving a spiel about my research and poster topic. There are banners on stage for the Australian Institute of Physics and diraq.
April 7, 2025 at 11:36 PM
astroryan.bsky.social
why is my sock looking like a hr diagram
a picture of a lone sock on some carpet. the sock is dotted with coloured circles, where the circles on the left are a deep blue, a lighter blue in the centre, and yellowy-orange on the right. like a hr diagram!
February 26, 2025 at 1:07 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
aye not a bad view for a run
a view of the sydney harbour as seen from a hill. the sydney harbour bridge is visible in the centre, with the opera house just underneath it and the CBD skyline to the right. there are many boats in the foreground water
February 23, 2025 at 6:53 AM
astroryan.bsky.social
okay among all the regressions that overleaf has been pumping out, this equation preview is actually very neat and handy
a screenshot of raw latex code (in Overleaf) for an equation with cases. there is a compiled preview of the equation above the raw text showing what the code will produce.
February 10, 2025 at 2:30 AM