An August Astrobite

Just finished my Astrobites article for August - possibly my last one, since I'm winding up my PhD work! So the other meaning of 'august' may apply too, hopefully... You can read it here.

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I wanted to do something slightly different for this article, and since I've recently been getting interested in stellar populations in star clusters, I thought it would be good to find a new paper on the subject and use that as a platform to talk about them.

(A nice picture of M80: credit to the Hubble heritage team)

Looking back on the last year and a half of writing for Astrobites, it occurs to me that this means my astrobites articles have undergone a kind of 'cosmic downsizing'! My first ever was about galaxy clusters (and was really an excuse to talk about the cooling-flow problem, something I got interested in during my undergraduate degree). I went on to write articles about some of the biggest galaxies in the local universe and ran with that theme intermittently, since such galaxies have been the focus of my PhD. Recently though, I wrote about dwarf galaxies - and now find myself writing about stellar populations that come in absurdly small scoops of 100,000 stars or so...

Anyway. Writing for Astrobites has been an absolute blast. I estimate the sum total of my articles as being about 16,000 words, which by my reckoning is around a third of my thesis - and I am reasonably confident will be read by more people!