Fun Fact Science with Kovi

@funfactscience.com

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Astrophysics PhD candidate studying stars that go snap, crackle, and pop - communicating scientist - meme aficionado.

Stargate character Captain Carter in the background looking at project hail mary lego
Background: tv showing Stargate on wooden console with plants. Foreground: project hail mary lego on wooden table
caption "I'm leardning" with Ralph Wiggum and Lisa Simpson, after Ralph completes the word "CASA" on his screen with an image of a cat
Black and white album art featuring two men posing pensively. The text reads "straight outta science"
Photo of man with beard wearing open, short-sleeved shirt covered in star patterns on top of white t-shirt. In the background are simulated magnetic field lines for the binary system. Credit: Carl Knox (OzGrav/Swinburne)
Simulated magnetic field lines for a binary system that is close enough for the stars to interact. Credit: Carl Knox (OzGrav/Swinburne) & Joshua Preston Pritchard (CSIRO)
GIF showing simulation of magnetic fields in a closely orbiting binary system containing a white dwarf and a red dwarf companion. Credit: Carl Knox (OzGrav/Swinburne) & Joshua Preston Pritchard (CSIRO)
Galactic map showing positions of long-period transients (LPTs), including those with evidence of binary systems and galactic centre radio transients (GCRTs). Background image of Gaia stars in Milky Way: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, A. Moitnho
Text reading "SCIENCE ACTUALLY PRESENTS THE NERD AND THE SCIENTIST" against a space background. An astronaut rides a giant rubber duck encircled by planetary rings. Floating around them are two dogs in spacesuits with bubble helmets, a space shuttle silhouette, and a satellite shaped like a microphone. The Science Actually logo sits at the bottom.
A comic strip titled "CARDS FOR SCIENTISTS FROM THEIR NON-SCIENTIST RELATIONS" featuring a lineup of three humorous greeting cards. The first card has a pink border and shows a shooting star with a question mark in the middle. The text reads: "WELL DONE! DOING WELL AT WHATEVER IT IS THAT YOU DO". The second card has a blue, space-themed background with stars and a planet. The text in the centre reads: "WE STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR WORK AT ALL, BUT WE ARE VERY PROUD". The third card features a drawing of a complicated, confusing machine with dials and buttons. The text reads: "CONGRATULATIONS! BUT PLEASE DON'T TRY TO EXPLAIN IT AGAIN".
A two-panel meme featuring Krusty the Clown’s accountant from The Simpsons, edited to joke about academic publishing. Top Panel: The character is looking at two nearly identical research article headers from the journal Ecology and Evolution. Both papers appear to be from the same "Forward Series." The first paper is titled: "Two Species Whose Ranges Are Shifting Uphill Are Not Pollen Limited, But Are More Successful Selfers Than Two Non-Shifting Species." The second paper is titled: "Leaf Damage Is Not The Answer! Reduced Herbivore Pressure Does Not Underpin Either Downhill or Uphill Range Shifts." Bottom Panel: A close-up of the character’s bewildered face with the caption: "I'M SEEING DOUBLE HERE." This references the original show dialogue, "I'm seeing double here—four Krustys!", implying the two papers are so similar in appearance, topic, and journal branding that they are indistinguishable at a glance.
Four people standing in front of a projection screen displaying the ACAMAR logo (天圆六) in a brick-walled venue.
A presentation slide titled "Data challenges" featuring a scatter plot of the transient phase space and a meme of a person labeled "Astronomers" getting blasted in the face with water labeled "Data" from a hose labeled "Telescopes".
A smiling man with a beard wearing hiking gear, including a green jacket, grey pants, and a bright orange backpack, poses with trekking poles on a mountain trail. Behind him is a scenic view of a deep, lush green valley leading down to a body of water, flanked by steep mountains and partially obscured by low-hanging clouds.
Lightcurves from all ASKAP, ATCA, and MeerKAT radio observations phase-folded to the radio period of 2147.27 s. Green shading indicates the range of uncertainty in predicted pulse time around the expected pulse phase of 0.5. Pulses are only detected in the ASKAP and ATCA observations between 2025-01-09 and 2025-01-17.
smiling man with glasses in orange tshirt. next to smiling quokka with no glasses and no tshirt.
Kent Brockman from the Simpsons saying: " AND I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW rubbery OVERLORDS."
A white fluffy dog with his tongue out sits on a concrete ledge in the foreground on a sunny day. Behind the dog is a wide body of blue water with a large cable-stayed bridge spanning across it, along with docked boats and city buildings in the distance.
A man with a beard and glasses, wearing a light-colored button-up shirt, is giving a presentation in a conference room. He is standing to the right of a large screen displaying the text "ALTERNATIVE PROGENITORS" and beneath it "Isolated white dwarf (Rea et al., 2024)" next to an image of a bright, blueish-white star against a black background labeled "NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)". The screen also features a university logo in the bottom right corner. Several audience members are seated in dark chairs, viewed from the back, watching the presenter and the screen. The room has light wood paneling on the back wall and white ceiling tiles.
A stellar density map of a barred spiral galaxy viewed face-on. The image shows a dark background with a central bright, elongated feature (the bar) surrounded by fainter spiral arms. The color bar on the right indicates the log10 Stellar Density in units of solar mass per square parsec, ranging from 0 (black/dark) to 4 (white/bright). The x and y axes are labeled in kpc (kiloparsecs), spanning from -10 to 10. Overlaid on the image are several highlighted regions: a central white, bright feature is enclosed by a dashed cyan ellipse representing the full Bar region. A smaller, cyan dashed box labeled Inner-bar is located along the bar's major axis, excluding the ends. Two symmetrically placed, dashed teal boxes labeled Bar-ends are located near the extremities of the bar. This visualization highlights the key components of the galaxy's bar structure.
mocking spongebob meme with the text "radio telescopes can observe in any weather"
There are seven billion people in the world. So when one of them behaves badly toward you, he's actually doing you a great favor because he's saving you time. He's telling you that he's not worth your while. He's freeing you to say, "Thank you for the information. I will now move on to the 6,999,999,999 other people, some of whom may have some value.
a man in blue jeans, white sneakers, and a grey nasa tshirt throwing his paper into Nature
grid of squares showing baseline pairs between the 6 dishes of the ATCA radio telescope. most of the squares display noisey red and white signals.
man in beige shirt and pants standing in front of crowd sitting in auditorium. screen shows image of a blueish star pulling material from a larger redder star. the title on the screen is "periodic radio and x-ray emission from an accreting white dwarf binary. - demystifying long period transients"
Text 1: reading for pleasure implies the existence of reading for pain Text 2: they're calling it a PhD
screenshot of the MESA documentation FAQ page where the first question is "how do you say MESA?" and the answer is "Say 'MAY-sa`"
Photo of a blue book with the white text title "does it fart?" with farting yellow fish on the cover. In the background is a white fluffy husky dog and wooden floors
White fluffy Spitz/husky dog sitting on wooden floors with a white background. Next to him a hand is holding a certificate of bravery for "showing great courage and being the best boy"
astronomical HR diagram with grey dots in the background for optical gaia stars and colourful markers showing the radio stars - colour scaled by radio luminosity from yellow (lower) to purpler (higher)
a white fluffy dog have its head scritched
laptop screen with code next to latte out of focus in foreground. background is courtyard of cafe with tables and chairs along the brick walls. plants hand from the wooden rafters.
from astropy import units as u smoot = u.def_unit('smoot', 1.7018 * u.m)
Skyscrapers around the Chicago river at night. With reflections of lights from the buildings on the water
Autographed (squiggled) tickets from the show. In black and white (which makes everything better). Shows a person sitting in a hula hoop.
View of the Chicago skyline from the museum campus - foreground is the lake
Partial lunar eclipse
this is fine meme of cartoon dog in room on fire, but with added additional arms holding papers and coffees and laptops
white dog on path in front of blue water with cable-stayed bridge in the background
Man with brown hair and beard in green shirt standing in front of screen presenting to audience
Man in a purple spacesuit riding a rubber duck with a saturn-like ring around it. there are two dogs in spacesuits floating nearby as well as a microphone with solar panels attached like a satellite. the text at the top reads "the nerd and the scientist" the background shows a range of space mission patches
Wikipedia screenshot: Betteridge's law of headlines From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.
person with brown hair and beard with glasses standing in front of a bookshelf holds up a Cosmos magazine with an image of a bare tree on a rocky land
White wolf-like dog resting with eyes closed on wooden floor
Four people stand in front of a projector screen showing "Vera C. Rubin Observatory: LSST Workshop"
Photo of astrophysicist (me) giving a talk in front of slide that shows a blueish white dwarf accreting material from a red dwarf star. The title shown is "Periodic Radio Emission from a White Dwarf Binary and the Link to Long Period Transients"
"My god... it's full of stars" text on background GIF of astronaut's illuminated face from 2001: A Space Odyssey
Blue Origin Announces Canine Crew for New Shepard’s 42nd Mission Blue Origin today announced the six doggos flying on its NS-42 mission. The crew includes a King Charles Cavalier, Golden Retriever, Shiba Inu, Staffordshire Terrier, Canaan Dog, and a Husky-Spitz cross. This mission is the 1st canine flight for the New Shepard program and the 42nd overall. The live webcast on BlueOrigin.com will start at T-30 minutes. The flight date will be announced soon.
"Cosmos Print magazine and subscriptions set to close" white text on red background
a black spider cat with green eyes
SOFIA - the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a Boeing 747SP aircraft - flying over the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains with its telescope door open during a test flight.
Protestors standing on the Quadrangle grass at the University Sydney waving Taliban flags and Palestinian flags.