(if you have to click "Save Letter" after uploading the letter, or else it is lost, you should also lose 1 of your degrees)

this is happening at every level, from undergraduates to career astronomers to non-professional astronomers. while the difficulties getting into grad school and the low JWST success rate have different proximal causes, i think they are part of a much larger change that we aren't grappling with well

high success rates typically reflect a limit in who is able to apply. we mostly don't have such limits for applying for time or $$. improvements in communications and computing technology + more astronomers has led to a system where, objectively, there is just an enormous demand to do astro research

i don't see "we gave out $$ randomly" as a politically defensible position.

cancelling admissions is a bigger deviation from N when N is large, as it is in most physics departments. lots also have GTA positions that need to be filled one way or another. my guess is we see some severe curtailments in physics but few cancellations.

I think most folks know that intellectually grad admissions is going to be tough this year, but it's going to be tougher than most anticipate.

Past experience shows that it's very difficult to separate "random HI cloud" from "galaxy that has only HI" and the prior probability on the former is large. Are you more sanguine?

And pump gas

These sims exclude gas accretion, yes? I.e. they are modeling the IMBH growth post tidal stripping of w Cen.

It's far from clear to me that more $$ to GRFP as they currently exist is the best way to help students. More grants to pay for students to go to rich universities that fund them already? I think the program structure needs rethinking.

N6791 is somewhat mass-segregated, which makes the odds of a pulsar far from the center low. Since it's too faint to get a parallax distance until the ngVLA is operating, proper motion is the most likely way to assess the association.

you could relabel this list as "didn't think we needed to publish in nature to prove our results were important"

some long-standing REU programs are being cut this year. i would take an offer in hand ASAP.

we are not (actually larger than typical). however, some places that have not yet send out acceptances are delaying while trying to get some clarity on funding pauses.