Sylvia Biscoveanu @sylvia_bisco Twitter profile

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

And if you can’t make it or just want a sneak peek, check out my talk at last year’s @tedxfulbright in Canberra!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 months

They say dress for the job you want... so it's a good thing this Princeton T-shirt that I got as a prospective graduate student in 2017 has been a regular in my rotation. I am thrilled to share that I will be joining @PrincetonPhys as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Thesis: defended ☑️ You can now call me Dr. Biscoveanu 😎

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

I made this masterpiece of a plot today; how’s your day going? 🙃

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

I passed my oral exam and am officially a PhD candidate! Which means I can stop worrying about the opacity of protostars on the Hayashi track and the spectrum of E-modes of the CMB and go back to worrying about gravitational waves!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

If you've heard me talk about "secret LIGO work" over the last several months, I'm super excited to finally be able to share the discovery of GW230529: the first observation of a mass-gap object merging with a neutron star! Image: @astronerdika 1/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Excited to finally share that I will be a @NASA Einstein fellow @NUCIERA in the fall! Grateful for the opportunity to keep listening to the Universe with gravitational waves, and looking forward to meeting the other amazing fellows in my cohort!

2023 NHFP Fellows

Read short profiles about the 2023 NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) awardees.

www.stsci.edu

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

@KyleMorgenstein You actually can’t be on the student subscription for more than four years as I am sadly learning this year! Even with a different university email, as long as it’s associated with the same account ☹️

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

11 months

When I say “spin is a measure of the angular momentum of the spacetime” in talks but in my head I think “black hole ball go whirrrrrr”

A meme page to check every time MatLab crashes

@memecrashes

11 months

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Any other GW data analysis folks feel like we’re in a weird limbo between physics and astronomy? I’m not really a theorist or experimentalist but also definitely not an observational astronomer in the traditional sense… makes it hard to understand where we fit in

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Grateful for the opportunity to represent gravitational waves at #HEAD20 in Hawaii with my talk on how we can use future observations with @LISACommunity to probe tides in double white dwarfs! 1/4

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

My first first-author paper is on the arXiv today! With @sasomao and @CJHaster we investigated how well the chirp mass of binary neutron stars can be determined by low latency gravitational wave searches 1/n

The reliability of the low-latency estimation of binary neutron...

The LIGO and Virgo Collaborations currently conduct searches for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in real-time. For promising candidate events, a sky map and distance...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

The universe listened to my plea - and gave us an NSBH! Online PE finished in about half an hour and we got the skymap out promptly after that. Sorry for the 25000 deg^2 sky localization 😅

Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

I’m on shift for the O4 rota starting next week, hoping for more excitement than the last time around! #mergebabymerge

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

6 months

The universe likes to wait until I’m on the PE ROTA to give us potentially EM-bright sources! Check out these classifications and the updated skymap I just sent out:

Christopher Berry

@cplberry

6 months

🚨 An exciting one! #GravitationalWave candidate #S240422ed If real, the source is probably a neutron star–black hole (could have an electromagnetic counterpart) False alarm rate 1 in 10^5 yr GraceDB GCN Rating 🍫🎱🥯 #O4IsHere

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Today Nobel Laureate Rai Weiss saw me walk into the office with my violin and asked me if I wanted to play the Mozart Violin Sonatas with him on piano. That is all.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Katerina Chatziioannou shares exciting new results from @LIGO at #AAS235 - the detection of the second binary neutron star merger #GW190425 with the heaviest total mass of any known double neutron star system!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Cheesin hard while presenting my work on gravitational-wave astronomy with @LIGO - @ego_virgo during my dissertation talk at #AAS241 including correlations in the binary black hole spin distribution and multimessenger prospects of neutron star-black hole mergers

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Do you often find yourself wondering why binary black hole component spins are so hard to measure? Are you despondent about the fact that the spins of LIGO-Virgo black holes seem to be small? Then may be for you!

A new spin on LIGO-Virgo binary black holes

Gravitational waves from binary black holes have the potential to yield information on both of the intrinsic parameters that characterize the compact objects: their masses and spins. While the...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 months

Excited to be @astronomy2024 this week in Cape Town (local penguins below)! Catch me tomorrow morning during the 1st plenary session presenting the latest results from @LIGO - @ego_virgo - @KAGRA_PR , and check out the corresponding GW230529 paper now in ApJL:

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

Kicking off Thursday @APSMeetings with an engaging session on Population Inference of Gravitational Wave Sources! First up, @ColmMTalbot presenting an alternative, entropy-based approach to standard hierarchical inference working directly with strain instead of posterior samples

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

I’m on shift for the O4 rota starting next week, hoping for more excitement than the last time around! #mergebabymerge

Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Alas, during O3a I was on the parameter estimation ROTA four times and all my events were either sub-threshold or glitches, and now when I was next up on the ROTA for O3b, the run is suspended... suspicious? 🤔

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

@LIGO - @ego_virgo meeting experience greatly improved by presence of purring cat. 10/10 would recommend

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Excited to talk about multi messenger prospects for neutron-star black mergers at #GWPAW22 . Spoiler alert- they’re not good!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Ended my last ever in-person class as a student with a derivation of the Bianchi identity... not a bad way to go out but it’s bittersweet

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

Choosing which waveform model to use for gravitational-wave data analysis remains a contentious question even after 20 years… as Alessandra Buonanno tells us at the 25th anniversary lecture of the effective one-body approach at the LVK meeting @LSUphysastro @LIGO @ego_virgo

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

If you want to learn what these new detections tell us about the population of compact objects, check out the science summary written by me!

LIGO

@LIGO

3 years

We have exciting news! We've just released our new @LIGO @ego_virgo @KAGRA_PR catalog #GWTC3 ,which includes many more detections from the 2nd part of #O3 and brings our total number of #GravitationalWaves events to 90. Read all about #GWTC3 at

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Since @astronerdika can’t tweet while she’s presenting, here she is telling us about the best models to use for the binary black hole spin distribution at #GWPAW22

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

I had a busy day @APSMeetings yesterday, starting with my thesis talk in the Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin Dissertation Award Finalist Session. Check out the summary of my talk in this @astrobites article!

astrobites

@astrobites

7 months

From @astrobites : We report on Day 1 of the 2024 April @APSMeetings ! #AprilAPS

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

My professional website is now up, check it out (especially if you’ve been looking for an easy condor tutorial)! And if you’ve been needing some encouragement to make your own: you, too, can learn just enough html to edit a website template!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

I just sent a GCN circular for an LVK event! It's an updated skymap for last week's BBH event obtained using full parameter estimation. Sort of wild that I have this power...

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

If you’re curious about how we can probe the gravitational-wave signal leftover from the early universe, read on...

MIT Physics

@MIT_Physics

4 years

A team led by Physics grad student Sylvia Biscoveanu has developed a method to tease out the very faint signals of primordial ripples from gravitational-wave data. @ScienceMIT @MITKavli @sylvia_bisco

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Nothing like looking back at code you wrote five years ago to find that it’s actually really clever and well commented and you can reuse it for a new project 😌

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Apparently at THE @MIT_ISTnews there is no native way to set up automatic out of office emails with exceptions for certain addresses… so you heard it here first that I’m taking time off before starting my postdoc in September! Ciao from Venice 👋

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

If you’ve ever been curious about the nitty gritty details of the statistical properties of LIGO noise, check out my talk today on the effect of PSD uncertainty on GW parameter estimation at @ipam_ucla (recording and slides👇)

Abstract - IPAM

www.ipam.ucla.edu

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Lively discussion on how to access stochastic backgrounds in next-generation ground-based GW detectors like @CosmicExpGW in the presence of astrophysical foregrounds at this evening’s session at #gwpopnext . We look forward to learning a lot from @LISACommunity #teamglobalfit

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Got an especially cute picture of Charlotte last night 🥰

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Excited to share my new paper () with @ColmMTalbot @EHThrane @SuperSymmetric1 because it means I get to do a 🧵 on stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds, which have the potential to reveal information about the early Universe! 1/n

Measuring the primordial gravitational-wave background in the...

Primordial gravitational waves are expected to create a stochastic background encoding information about the early Universe that may not be accessible by other means. However, the primordial...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Lots of interesting talks at the April @APSMeetings on gravitational-wave populations! First up, @EdelmanBruce telling us about non-parametric inference of the BBH mass distribution.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Quick little thread on a quick little research note that will likely be my last work with my MIT affiliation… Have you been wondering how many gamma-ray bursts come from neutron star-black hole mergers? 1/3

An observational upper limit on the rate of gamma-ray bursts with...

Compact-object binary mergers consisting of one neutron star and one black hole (NSBHs) have long been considered promising progenitors for gamma-ray bursts, whose central engine remains poorly...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

If you like gamma-ray bursts, relativistic jets, neutron stars, gravitational waves, or hierarchical Bayesian inference check out my new paper with Eric Thrane and @sasomao ! 1/n

Constraining short gamma-ray burst jet properties with...

Gamma-ray burst (GRB) prompt emission is highly beamed, and understanding the jet geometry and beaming configuration can provide information on the poorly understood central engine and...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Excited to hear about populations of black holes and neutron stars from @astronerdika today who is visiting LIGO MIT all the way from Australia!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

This is Charlotte. We’ve only known each other for 8 hours but I’ve already taught her the basics of how LIGO works. She’s a fast learner.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

New preprint on the arXiv with @sasomao , @CJHaster , and undergrad Jonathan Davies, investigating how the uncertainty in the gravitational wave detector noise properties affects the parameters we infer for compact binaries observed by @LIGO 1/n

Quantifying the Effect of Power Spectral Density Uncertainty on...

In order to perform Bayesian parameter estimation to infer the source properties of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences (CBCs), the noise characteristics of the detector must be...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Excited to finally share a new paper on the kilonova discovery potential of the Wide-field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER): with Danielle Frostig, @gmo_omg , Viraj Karambelkar, @sasomao and others @MITKavli , @PMACaltech , and @IJCLab 1/4

An Infrared Search for Kilonovae with the WINTER Telescope. I....

The Wide-Field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER) is a new 1 $\text{deg}^2$ seeing-limited time-domain survey instrument designed for dedicated near-infrared follow-up of kilonovae from binary...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

My first time getting office mail and it comes with stickers! #bilbycodebestcode

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Caught Mulder doing some light reading of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler in X Files season 6 ep 14

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

🚨New paper on the arXiv today with @ColmMTalbot and @sasomao about how you can get the binary neutron star mass distribution wrong with gravitational wave measurements if you mismodel the spin:

The effect of spin mismodeling on gravitational-wave measurements...

The binary neutron star (BNS) mass distribution measured with gravitational-wave observations has the potential to reveal information about the dense matter equation of state, supernova physics,...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Feeling very inspired after three days of discussion on the future of GW astronomy at the PAX workshop! Thanks to SOC @sasomao @SuperSymmetric1 & Sarah Caudill for the opportunity to share my vision for a fully Bayesian approach to data analysis in the future with @CosmicExpGW !

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 months

I will be looking to grow my group over the next couple years. If you are interested in research in gravitational-wave astronomy at Princeton as a student (undergrad or grad) or postdoc, please feel free to reach out!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 months

This is not just the realization of a personal dream of mine, but also of the American dream. My great-great-grandmother took the shoes off her own feet so that my grandfather could go to school in rural Romania. Grateful for the support and inspiration of the @PDSoros community.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

I led the team of @LIGO - @ego_virgo -Kagra scientists working on the analysis and paper writing of this event with @spacedontwait . Check out his talk @APSMeetings at 1:30PM PDT today for more details, or read on for the highlights! 2/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Likelihood reweighting, aka importance sampling, is quickly becoming an important computational tool in gravitational-wave astronomy. Check out my #toolsofthetrade article in @NatRevPhys highlighting some neat applications and caveats for this technique

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

@sasomao tells us about potential pitfalls in gravitational-wave population inference at #GWPAW22 , highlighting our working showing that mismodeling the neutron star spin biases the mass inference. Misleading sub-solar mass compact objects, anyone?

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

Finally, the existence of equal-mass NSBH systems like this one leads to an increase in the inferred rate of NSBH systems detectable with gravitational waves that may have electromagnetic counterparts - good news for our EM observing partners following up public alerts! 7/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

This is how Charlotte and I take telecons in the evenings now while #SocialDistancing

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Having an unusual name has finally paid off!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

I learned more astrophysics studying for my quals than I did in classes. Yes I was extremely stressed for a semester, but I personally wouldn’t have retained nearly as much with a different format. An opportunity for repeated, extended consolidation I haven’t gotten otherwise

Leo C. Stein is @duetosymmetry on bsky/threads/🐘

@duetosymmetry

3 years

Unpopular opinion, but I learned and reinforced a ton of physics and astrophysics by studying for my quals. It also took me multiple attempts to pass. But ... studying deeply and persevering are valuable research skills

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

This is Halloween?

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 months

Sylvia from 10 years ago would never have dreamed that she could end up here. I am incredibly grateful to my mentors along the way for their guidance and to my family for their continued and unwavering support.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Last week I started questioning the validity of my entire analysis due to a factor of 2 discrepancy. Turns out I was using a different value for H0 than my collaborator who simulated the data I was trying to analyze 🙃 #troublewithhubble

Dr. Haley Wahl

@hwahl16

4 years

It’s Monday morning and I’ve been fighting with a factor of 2π in my code for the past half an hour....ah grad school. #PhDLife #AcademicChatter

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

10 months

A tip as we enter faculty campus interview season: take a screenshot of the schedule you’ve been given with the names and room numbers for all your meetings and set it as the Lock Screen for your phone or iPad or whatever you’re carrying around with you.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Check out this awesome highlight of our work identifying a correlation between the width of the binary black hole spin distribution and redshift in @AASNova !

AAS Nova

@AASNova

2 years

A New Spin on Binary Black Hole Evolution Today's article might leave your head spinning — read on for an investigation into how the spins of binary black holes have changed across cosmic time! @MITKavli @FlatironCCA @SBUResearch

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Really excited to be @yalecuwip this weekend as a panelist talking about “what I wish I knew about grad school” - and great to see so many future female physicists in one place!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

After five years as a student at MIT… I was not allowed to keep my student card for the memories when I went to get an employee ID card 😔 (have a temp position here until my postdoc starts in the fall)

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Alas, during O3a I was on the parameter estimation ROTA four times and all my events were either sub-threshold or glitches, and now when I was next up on the ROTA for O3b, the run is suspended... suspicious? 🤔

LIGO

@LIGO

5 years

This week we will suspend observing at @LIGOWA , @LIGOLA & @ego_virgo . We are working to ensure that all preparations are made for a smooth end of run. It is sad to end O3 early, but it has been a tremendously successful run, and we look forward to sharing our discoveries soon.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

@PotatoAsad @sasomao @quarkcharmer_ @MariosKalomen @CJHaster @chirpmass explains how normalizing flows can be used to interpolate population synthesis simulations between fixed training points in order to perform continuous inference on BBH formation channels using GW data (with @spacedontwait @cplberry )

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

If the universe could just hold up with the whole smashing compact objects together thing until I’m done with finals, that would be great.

Keita Kawabe

@keita_kawabe

5 years

Yet another @ligo and @ego_virgo GW public alert, #S190513bm , this time a likely BBH.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

It turns out we know less about binary black hole spin than we thought!

MIT Physics

@MIT_Physics

2 years

Study: Without more data, a black hole’s origins can be “spun” in any direction @ScienceMIT @sylvia_bisco

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

And thankful for the guidance of my wonderful advisor @sasomao @MITKavli without whom this certainly would not have been possible!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

So next time you find yourself wondering about the spins of binary black holes, be like Batman (memes courtesy of @sasomao ) 6/6

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

Do you want to learn the details of gravitational-wave data analysis from a team of experts @MIT_Physics ? Sign up to attend our GWODW study hub next week on campus!

Salvatore Vitale

@sasomao

1 year

If you are a student/postdoc/etc in the Boston area and interested in gravitational-wave data analysis, we are organizing one of these at MIT next week. Sign up (place is limited). There is homework to do in advance! Please share!🙏

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

This advice holds for early career folks on the postdoc job market too. Usually the postdocs are in charge of the early career seminar series in their departments, so ask your postdoc friends/collaborators to invite you!

Dr. Callan Hummel

@CallaHummel

1 year

Apparently we’re talking about how to get invited to other universities for talks! Here’s what has worked for me on the tenure tack:

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

I have about a year before I lose my own first physics bet… maybe @NANOGrav will detect the SMBHB background before then and neither of us will win on a technicality 😅

Dr. Jessie Christiansen

@aussiastronomer

3 years

So, last week I was sitting in a visitor office in the Caltech astronomy department, because one of our @caltechipac buildings flooded (😱). The office was in the TAPIR (Theoretical Astrophysics Including Relativity) wing, home of past greats like Roger Blandford and Kip Thorne.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

@JordanBHarrod It adopted an adult cat at the start of the second year of my PhD. I spend about $10 on dry food per month, $15 on wet food, and $15 on litter. The start-up items like carrier, bowls, litter box, food, some toys, treats, etc. cost about $150. So worth it!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

@spacedontwait opens this morning’s session at #gwpopnext by roasting population data analysts’ past overly optimistic predictions of our ability to distinguish binary formation channels

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Here’s a nice way to visualize the correlation that we find: slices of the binary black hole effective aligned spin distribution get wider at increasing redshifts, while the uncertainty (shaded region) stays roughly the same

Carl-Johan Haster

@CJHaster

3 years

New paper on the ArXiv led by @MITKavli grad student @sylvia_bisco . We look at the population of observed binary black holes (BBHs) to see if there are any correlations between the spin-mass-redshift properties of the population, and we found something!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

Including this event in our analyses of the NSBH population leads to a significant decrease in the inferred minimum mass of black holes in binaries with neutron stars, from ~6 Msun to ~3 Msun! 6/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Turned in my last assignment of my first year of grad school yesterday and I keep having residual pangs of “I should be studying right now” #makeitstop

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

Does this finally resolve the internal conflict I face every time I have to pick a category for my gravitational-wave data analysis conference talks? Am I a theorist? 😲

Hayley Roberts, PhD (she/her)

@astrohayley

4 years

There are two types of astrophysicists: those who harbor a lot of anger at clouds and theorists

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

@astrobel_rs tells us the recipe for the perfect gravitational-wave catalog-pizza this morning at #gwpopnext . Data quality checks ensure it’s tasty, thresholding ensures it’s just the right size

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

Observations of X-ray binaries have supported the existence of a "lower mass gap" in the compact-object mass spectrum between the most massive neutron stars and least massive black holes in the range of 3-5 Msun. 3/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Managed to shut out the imposter syndrome long enough to happily accept the invitation though!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

This means that GW230529 is the most equal-mass NSBH merger observed to date. We find that systems like this one are at least as common as the more "vanilla" NSBH systems with more massive black holes observed in the previous observing run. 5/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

TLDR: LISA will teach us about tidal physics in white dwarfs! Check out our paper here, which has been updated to include this new section on the inference method. 4/4

Probing the efficiency of tidal synchronization in outspiralling...

Compact-object binaries including a white dwarf component are unique among gravitational-wave sources because their evolution is governed not just by general relativity and tides, but also by mass...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

Boston friends, come out on Monday to hear me talk about the cosmic symphony of gravitational waves! Currently debating if I should bring my violin for demonstration purposes...

Astronomy On Tap BOS

@AoTboston

5 years

Join us for a pint at @AsgardCambridge 6pm Dec 16 to hear about weird exoplanets and the symphony of gravitational waves!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

Next @ColmMTalbot warns us about how our current methods for population inference will break down as our catalog size grows.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

GW230529 represents the strongest evidence for the existence of a compact object in this mass range. We infer that the mass gap object, the heavier of the two in the binary, is likely a black hole, while its companion is a neutron star. Image: @astronerdika 4/7

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

4 years

My upstairs neighbors are apparently the type of people that unironically listen to “My Heart Will Go On” on a daily basis... It’s on the same playlist as “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” that basically just loops all day 🙃

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

@MIT_Physics @ScienceMIT @NASA @SpaceTelescope Thanks for sharing! It’s worth also noting that another fellow in our cohort, Peter Kosec, is also currently based at MIT as a postdoc in the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

3 years

@sasomao reports on evidence for an anticorrelation between the mean of the effective spin distribution and mass ratio and a correlation between the width of the distribution with redshift

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

@PotatoAsad @sasomao @quarkcharmer_ @MariosKalomen presents a method to look for multiple correlations simultaneously rather than just between pairs of parameters (with @CJHaster ) - the solution is more Gaussians!

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

2 years

Super excited to share a new paper on a topic that’s outside my usual wheelhouse - probing tidal physics with mass transferring double white dwarf binaries with @LISACommunity ! With Kyle Kremer and @EHThrane 1/6

Probing the efficiency of tidal synchronization in outspiralling...

Compact-object binaries including a white dwarf component are unique among gravitational-wave sources because their evolution is governed not just by general relativity and tides, but also by mass...

arxiv.org

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

@PotatoAsad @sasomao @quarkcharmer_ @MariosKalomen @CJHaster @chirpmass @spacedontwait @cplberry Finally, @JacobGolomb shares results from an astrophysically-motivated model searching for a peak in the black hole mass distribution from pulsational pair-instability supernovae. There is tension between GW observations and nuclear reaction rates! (with @maxisi @farrwill )

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

@DavidBerardo_ @kaleybrauer @CDBrownII @aliciacintora @keshawnrants @CA_AstroComm @__katrinarenee @EveVavagiakis @KaitlinDeutsch @NicholasMehrle @CapWasRight @QuantumEmanuel @NZMason @ThatBenjiL @aCarlRodriguez @kait_shin 1) I’ve been playing violin for 19 years and viola for 9! 2) I’m first-gen American. My parents immigrated from Romania. 3) I had pet ducks for a few weeks when I was little. #3facts5scientists : @CJHaster @actualdrdoctor @CalvinLeung12 @c_debatri @AstroJake

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

1 year

@astronerdika continues the analogy talking about contamination. Do you want a small but pure pizza-catalog, or a large exotic pizza-catalog that may have some bad wheat-events?

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

I was today years old when I learned that in English words that end in -mb, the b is silent. And here I was saying lamB, tomB, bomB, etc.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

10 months

You won’t need to worry about misplacing a physical printout or about pulling it up from your email before each meeting. (Tip borrowed from wedding planning 😅)

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

7 months

@PotatoAsad @sasomao Anarya Ray shares another method to look for correlations using a binned Gaussian process, in his words “a glorified histogram” (work with @quarkcharmer_ ). They find evidence for a different chi_eff distribution for 30-40 Msun black holes compared to the bulk of the population.

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Sylvia Biscoveanu

@sylvia_bisco

5 years

End-of-semester feels Credit: @nathanwpyle Strange Planet

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