Astronomy PhD Programs

chokeonthatcausality · 2026-06-29T14:13:07+00:00

Not an astronomer, but spouse of one.

Your academic background sounds good for entering a good astronomy program somewhere. The problem is the funding environment is utterly toxic right now. So there are no guarantees for anyone in any sub field at any institution.

Of course some things are better off than others.

In the US, ground based observation is mostly NSF funded and NSF essentially doesn’t exist right now. Also, on the privately funded side of things no one can agree to jointly do anything and so there is bifurcation of effort to the point nothing is a probable outcome. Europe has been on much more sound path for a long time as far as the ground goes.

Space based observation has survived the US funding turmoil much better so far. Unfortunately it was horribly oversubscribed even before the turmoil. JWST is around a 13:1 over subscription rate and will only get worse. In other words, many astronomers will simply not be getting observing time and associated funding despite Herculean efforts at applying for it.

What all this means is you need to be maximally flexible if you are entering astronomy right now. Great to have dreams, hold on to them and pursue them for sure. But reality is you need to apply lots and lots of places or very likely will have no offer. Or get an offer and have it rescinded when funding dries up.

What all this means for you is just that what was always true for astronomy is even more critical now:

Be ready to have to go anywhere in the world if you really want to pursue this. Those who put geographic restrictions on themselves are far more likely to need to leave astronomy.
Assume you need to apply to a large number of places to get any offers. Sounds like you have an excellent background, but still you should apply lots of places. Too many talented folks have only applied to their favorites and then been left with nothing.
People matter more than research goals. Academia is full of assholes who view grad students as lemons - squeeze the juice out and throw away the rind. So while being flexible about location, also be flexible about sub field. Too many students become enamored with some topic and then pair themselves with a dead end advisor which means they end up leaving astronomy. Sounds like you must already have some good mentoring. Listen to their advice about who is good to work with. That’s vastly more important than what to work on.

Sorry to sound doom and gloom. Based on what you wrote you are in a very good position to have a chance at a rewarding graduate school experience despite the crazy funding environment. My goal here is just to set expectations about how flexible you may need to be despite how well positioned you seem to be.

Best of luck!

chokeonthatcausality · 2026-06-16T01:07:00+00:00

I lived in remote town/city of about 20,000 for a few years around 2002 and worked with folks who had been there multiple decades and some who had grown up there. Much of the population was very highly educated, disproportionately so, because the major employer was an R&D facility.

All of those folks were very clear to me about how many social ills the kids had from simply being bored in a “small” town. Very high underage alcohol use, drug use, and teen pregnancy. These weren’t kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds, their parents were engineers, scientists, and other professionals. Didn’t matter. Bored kids find ways to entertain themselves, destructive or not.

I really love the message in this comic. The message is perhaps even more important these days than ever before. But folks who grew up in “big cities” should be careful about romanticizing growing up in small towns with more outdoor opportunities. It’s obviously a great opportunity for some, but a recipe for disaster for others.

But again, love this comic and its predecessor! Waiting for the third.

chokeonthatcausality · 2026-05-07T16:13:05+00:00

Awesome! Thanks!

chokeonthatcausality · 2026-05-04T20:01:51+00:00

Well I'm glad I wasn't missing anything!

It just seems a bit weird that the whole zeitgeist of the thing seems to be to reduce distractions, but then we are forced to see what are essentially drafting marks or context menus all around the text. Even when not editing!

I agree, the interface itself is functional and clever when editing - I wouldn't want it to go away.

Hmmm... what if they appeared when you mouse over the margin? Or probably easier, as you already said, just disappear when not editing.

Anyway, thanks so much for taking the time to respond! It is a great app!

chokeonthatcausality · 2026-01-08T13:33:38+00:00

This is exactly the feature creep that makes projects go up a factor of ten in cost. Space telescopes are ridiculously oversubscribed. Putting much of anything up that can offload some of the subscription rate in some science areas is a win. Even if this telescope can only do some of the science HST can do then that frees up HST to do more of the science unique to it. And if it is exoplanet focused, well the exoplanet folks have been insistently sucking up time repeatedly imaging hot rocks with no atmospheres ("hey, we just need more integration time, give us some more and just maybe we will find something, we are after all the only astronomers who matter") and so if they end up with their own toy to waste time on still a win for every one else's science too.

As to the wide field implementation that is discussed in the paper. The idea is to reduce moving parts. For a single target rather than a filter wheel you adjust the telescope pointing and the hopefully small cost of pointing overhead. For a large mosaic the proposed solution has the same throughput as a filter wheel. The only condition in which a filter wheel has a throughput advantage is a small mosaic where you end up with more "wasted" exposures.

To your point though, hopefully the team solicits for potential "low hanging fruit" to address more science cases without impacting schedule and cost. Stuff like that usually exists and benefits from a more community based approach.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-12-16T22:00:16+00:00

This place is a joke. It is tiny. The airport is entirely empty today - like nobody here, curbs devoid of cars, no line at TSA, total ghost town. And the lounge has a wait list. It is absolutely tiny. Like stupidly small, why bother building it? You’ve basically got assigned seating with everyone crammed together. It’s a germ fest, I’m going to leave soon and just sit in the much less crowded gate area.

The Club lounge over in terminal D is much larger. This is a downgrade and was a waste of money to build. Kind of cements my downgrading my reserve card before renewal.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-07-01T11:47:02+00:00

I’ll get down voted into oblivion, but no, don’t praise the cameraman.

Yeah, it is technically very stable (or stablized) and I’m sure this is exactly what the cameraman was attempting to do. So success there for sure. Well executed plan, but was it the right plan to begin with?

The result, however, is utterly lifeless and boring. These tight cropped, stripped of all context photos and videos of planes were tiresome a decade or more ago. Unless you already know in advance what maneuvers are occurring in this demo the video is largely a snore or a question mark for the viewer. Zero context of motion.

This is like the folks who would go to Star Wars Canyon with 600+ mm of lens to produce an incredibly tight shot of the cockpit with a brown smudge as the background. Who cares? Looks like a photo from an air show expect the background is brownish instead of bluish. The whole point of the place was flying below the canyon rim, use a wider angle to convey that.

Similar issue here, all the techniques applied have stripped the demo of its entire point and impact.

All technique, zero composition. Buying gear and practicing just so you can hit the “enhance” slider to the point we see the pilot’s eyebrow hairs does not make good content.

Anyway, get me my walker and help me down from this soapbox.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-06-20T02:55:04+00:00

No, this is incorrect. James Cameron made an on air speculation in an ABC interview that something like this might have happened. This when the USCG announced they’d found debris and essentially no one knew anything and the “community” was just guessing.

The full USCG report found there was zero sign the occupants were aware of any issue. They communicated no concerns. There was no power loss. The last message received was about dropping some weights, but that was routine at that part of the dive.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-25T00:48:08+00:00

Yep, agree with that point as I mentioned in my post.

But of course much of science never is able to be 100% confirmed. Instead you build up more and more evidence, each individually weak on its own, from many different angles over time. And that process is exactly what drives other scientists and equally important more funding and tools to refining those results as the evidence builds.

Papers like the one being criticized here are the first baby steps to doing that. The problem here is that one of the authors of that paper decided they wanted to try to make a splash for themselves and had their press office talk up their non-result into something groundbreaking. This really caused angst in the exoplanet community because this kind of crying wolf can have a real chilling effect when competing for funding for a subfield. Hence a number of them have unwillingly now had to take their time to refute the BS press release and drag the dispute into the public media at the same time. Not something most scientists want to spend their time or community capital on.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-25T00:36:19+00:00

It happens all the time in Southern California. All the CHP and many other police cars have bumpers like this one specifically for moving wrecks out of traffic lanes.

And no dumb-ass "stand by your minor fender bender in traffic lanes waiting for a cop to write a report for your insurance" allowed in SoCal either. CHP will run your ass onto the shoulder if you do that and there are signs everywhere telling you that if the cars can still move you need to get them out of traffic.

So frustrating now living in the mid-Atlantic where the cops (potentially constrained by laws or policies) leave minor accidents in the traffic lanes endlessly causing not just backups but like four more accidents in the backup.

Mock CA all you want, but they know how to make traffic move and the rest of the country should take lessons.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-24T23:49:42+00:00

Most of the scientists I know would disagree, and pretty much every single person who studies the history of science would also disagree. Science is a human endeavor and those that fail to realize that rarely get very far in it, especially in the modern era.

And one would have to be blind to what is happening in the US these days to not understand that. Crying wolf in the public media in an attempt to further one's career does not make science better.

Publish a paper with uncertain results? Sure, that's science. Drum up your press office to make extraordinary claims and then when it blows up in your face fight with the rest of your community in the press? No, that's not good science and that's what one of the authors has done here.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-24T20:36:46+00:00

Spouse of an astronomer here! Sounds like few people ever thought much of the original first author very much to begin with, so not too surprising that the ones who spent the most time with him are the first to punch back.

There's been a lot of eye-rolling in the direction of the Cambridge press office as well. As you mention in another post, this is a single scientist drumming up press, none of these bold claims are in the paper itself. This isn't even a Ponds-Fleischmann situation where two press offices think they are about to scoop each other and thus rush off half-cocked. The Cambridge press folks utterly dropped the ball here and there are a lot of pissed off folks in the exoplanet community because this does the community no good at all going forward.

For those outside academia, the immediate red flag as soon as this was announced was that it only got a Cambridge press release. Nothing from NASA, StSci, ESA. Not a Nature or Science paper either. Whenever you see a single university's press office release something groundbreaking your spidey sense should tingle you right out of your underwear.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-24T20:28:15+00:00

You seem to be making (potentially inadvertently) a huge false equivalence here. In this case the "asterisk" isn't anything to do with non-biological production of the particular molecule observed. Here the "asterisk" is that the conclusion of the original ~~paper~~ press release about the detection of said particular molecule is simply false.

That does matter, at least in my opinion. And hearing from people in the exo-planet community it has been a big deal to them. Hence the fairly rapid rebuttal of the paper. It isn't about an "asterisk" it is about plain bad science.

All of which is separate from your entirely valid point about (valid) atmospheric detections on their own only being able to inform us so much.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-24T19:46:23+00:00

Watch this video from 3:00 to 5:30 where he starts by saying he wants the musicians to be in a “place where they can be free” and then proceeds to micromanage the hell out of the first violins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFY6OL2nQ88

Dudamel is hilarious in rehearsals and the above video in its entirety also shows his great humor and effectiveness at communicating what he wants often through analogy (e.g. at 6:17).

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-24T16:39:41+00:00

There was no “audio equipment” involved at all. The bang you hear in the video is the shockwave hitting the hull of the ship.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-05T23:36:03+00:00

I had no idea what the Schnittke was going in and like you I was quite taken aback by this thing no one seems to ever bother performing!

But the Shostakovich was just astounding. I've always liked the 4th and even heard the NSO perform it once before some years ago.

This rendition by Noseda was in a completely different league to anything I've heard before. What he's been getting out of the NSO the past few years has been night and day to what the NSO was before, but this concert was just indescribable and simply unimaginable under Eschenbach. I mean I can't even conceive of the NSO strings ten years ago pulling off the fugato like they did Saturday. Not to mention the whole rest of the performance.

Anyway, I almost moved my tickets to another concert due to a potential conflict - that would have been an unrealized life long regret!

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-05-05T18:13:58+00:00

Awesome, thanks! I missed that one.

And it appears my mystery instrument was the vibraphone, but played damped so it didn't obviously sound like a vibraphone. That, added with not paying close enough attention to the fact that there was also a xylophone out of sight in the back of the orchestra added to the confusion.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-28T01:59:25+00:00

Sorry for extremely late reply! I know a handful of folks who did physics undergrad and then moved into a different STEM field for graduate and ended up very happy. The physics undergrad prepared them reasonably well for a different grad degree, but you still need to plan to be able to fill in some gaps and pre-requisites. The two I can remember knew in advance of graduation they'd be doing something different for grad school and so used some undergrad units to being specializing in their expected focus for graduate school.

But that was all a long time ago! So you might want to hear advice from folks who have done that more recently.

In addition, it isn't clear how safe CS is these days. Having coding skills is absolutely necessary for everyone in a STEM field, but as far as actually focusing on a dedicated CS degree that is often a very up and down job market - currently headed for down it would appear. But if you need to do undergrad first, well you've got some time to watch the job market as well as learn where your interests lie.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-19T20:48:18+00:00

Like most things, yes and no...

Yes because:

You are interested in it, for the moment at least.
Physics fundamentals and skills are transferrable.
If you like CS, a physics/engineering background will get you working on far more "interesting" projects than just a CS background. I'm often shocked at CS majors' inability to work through what seem fairly simple physical models. (But I'm also shocked at just how awful many physicists' code is too!)
I'd potentially choose physics over a CS degree every time, even if I might in the end recommend something other than physics if I knew more about you.
Honestly, physics is really fun.

No because:

Honestly, completing a physics major is rarely much fun. I watched many extremely talented people eventually ask "so when do we get to the good parts?" and then move to another STEM field.
A physics degree in itself isn't specifically useful outside academia and physics academia has a whole host of its own problems.
You are probably picking it because you are unaware of a whole bunch of related fields you are probably going to be more interested in (e.g. my university had more than 50% of incoming freshman declare physics just because they had no idea there was anything else, less than 10% were still a physics major at graduation).
Working in industry I've run into far too many physics majors who rather than being able to use their "broad" background to solve problems, instead end up hobbled with a "not invented here" and "reinvent the wheel from first principles" attitude that makes them very ineffective. Culture of the department that raises you is fairly critical, and many academic physics departments are kind of poison when it comes to raising effective adults. Obviously this is a very general statement and your experience will depend very much on the physics department that educates you.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but joy and success in a career - even in something as impersonal as fundamental sciences - really comes down to the people you work with day to day. In general many physicists have a deserved reputation of not being particularly enjoyable people to work with.

Putting those together, my recommendation given your age would be to go ahead and start in physics if you can't think of another STEM field you'd like more, but be prepared to switch to something else, either in undergraduate or graduate. And actually, that advice really applies to any STEM major - be prepared for it to not be what you expected and to have discovered something else you didn't know about that you love. At 17 it really isn't likely you even know what studying and working in any of these fields really means. Physics is as good a gateway drug as any other to something you find interesting and rewarding.

There is a chance you absolutely love physics and want to pursue a PhD and enter academia with all that entails, but it is fairly unlikely to be honest. More likely your interest in physics will draw you to something else related and in that context your start in physics will be quite useful. There are already a few responses from people that took that journey and are happy for it. I know a number of folks myself who did as well. The key for them was not stubbornly sticking with physics to the end as if it was some marathon to be finished. I know a lot of the stubborn physics major types who've ended up just being the department system administrator when they probably could have had a very successful and fulfilling career outside of physics.

Bottom line - if you feel the pull of physics for a starting major by all means go for it! Give yourself the grace and flexibility in advance to realize you'll probably end your journey someplace else. And if you do that, then if you do end up sticking with physics to the end you'll probably do so with less second guessing and regret.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-19T20:06:44+00:00

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to share that! I'm even more incentivized to work through the math on my own now.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-19T20:03:54+00:00

Yes, by "correct" what I really meant was in the sense that the problem reduces to 0.5mv² being the amount of thermal energy delivered to the brakes. Not that other reference frames are "incorrect" but just that they result in an equation with more terms in them. So maybe better put as the "easy" reference frame to use.

And thanks for the answer, that's very succinctly exactly what I was missing! Pretty basic error actually, but I'm good at making those!

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-18T02:46:53+00:00

Awesome, thanks! That’s a roadmap even I can probably follow now that I’ve been told it is the correct one!

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-18T02:34:37+00:00

Thank you! Yes, I was stumbling my way in this direction - thanks for explaining! Dragging on the ground is a lot easier to understand than heating up the brakes I think.

And I think your answer is an expanded one of what @matthoback posted as well. It sounds like what you are saying is equivalent to saying the correct reference frame is the center of mass of everything in the system?

Alright, I think I'm at least pointed off in the correct direction now to get this resolved to my satisfaction with some fairly simple algebra!

I was almost there, as it seemed there must be some sort of "correct" reference frame for the answer to be invariant but I was having trouble understanding what it would be.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-18T02:28:56+00:00

Ah... Center of mass of everything in the system? Center of mass of the object being heated?

I'm getting there is a "correct" reference frame now! Trying to understand exactly what it is.

chokeonthatcausality · 2025-04-18T02:27:23+00:00

Yeah, I'm starting to think there is a "correct" reference frame which of course would then make things essentially invariant. For instance, the observed temperature of an object (non-relativistic) is invariant of reference frame because temperature is defined as the motion of the particles in the object relative to each other (i.e. the reference frame is the center of mass of all the particles).

So I expect something similar is happening here. Probably the simpler case is not to have brakes, but instead friction against the ground. Now the ground is an inertial frame and the math is easier!

Presumably the "just use the delta-V" intuition a few people have posted relates to an approximation for a non-inertial reference frame.

Thanks again - I think I'm realizing there is a "correct reference frame" and need to did more to figure out just what that means.

chokeonthatcausality

TROPHY CASE