Congratulations to Dr. Genevieve Schroeder (Dr. Genevieve Schroeder) on her successful defense today! She showed the sheer power of radio observations for GRBs, and her novel observing strategies are responsible for the recent increased detection rate of short GRBs. Next stop: New York!

If there's a transients conference in the Midwest, you bet that CIERA is going to show up bigtime! Thanks for the great conference Purdue Physics&Astro! #risetime #besttime

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 PrincetonPhysics as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025!

arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02158 A uniform analysis led by Jill Rastinejad of ejecta properties from GRB kilonovae. Among several interesting findings is a + correlation btwn ejecta mass & GRB duration/energy, which could arise if Mej scales w/ the mass accreted by the BH (~ GRB jet power).

great work today by Jill Rastinejad analyzing properties of 8 kilonovae: 5 (3) following short (long) GRBs arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02158 Lots of diversity, but they find small hints that the ones from long GRBs might? have larger M_ej (which maybe means asymmetric binary mergers?😍) 👇

🚨Paper Alert🚨 Do you like heavy elements, kilonovae, GRBs or compact object mergers? Check out this 🧵 on the freshly-submitted "Uniform Modeling of Observed Kilonovae: Implications for Diversity and the Progenitors of Merger-Driven Long Gamma-Ray Bursts" led by Jill Rastinejad

We uniformly modeled 8(!) kilonovae, the largest sample to date, using a "3-component" model. Each component has a different ejecta opacity, and roughly maps to an emission mechanism like disk winds (purple) or tidally stripped dynamical ejecta (red).

Our modeling shows that the famous kilonova, GW170817/AT2017gfo, is pretty average in its ejecta masses (red star compared to grey 68% confidence interval). Amongst the population, we see evidence for significant diversity in each component.

Excitingly, we also measure larger masses of tidally-stripped (red) ejecta for kilonovae following long GRBs compared to short GRBs. Though a bigger sample is needed for a significant correlation, this may hint that long GRBs from mergers are produced in asymmetric binaries!

To see more on our study, visit this arXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2409.02158

Wen-fai Fong visited Steward Observatory, University of Arizona at University of Arizona in Tucson this week to accept the 2024 Marc Aaronson Prize. Aaronson was a pioneer in an astonishing number of topics, from elliptical galaxies to globular clusters to the age of the Universe.

Both of my advisors are on the TIME100 list?!?! I am screaming right now. WOW. time.com/7023473/maria-…

🚨Paper Alert🚨 Recently graduated Dr. Anya Nugent questions the role of neutron star mergers in the Universe’s heavy r-process element enrichment in her new paper arxiv.org/abs/2410.00095…. Fun collaboration with Alex Ji! Check out the 🧵 for more details!

Animals in space? Our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was named after the bird for its ability to fly quickly and cover great distances, like how the spacecraft swiftly pinpoints gamma-ray bursts. But it weighs as much as a giraffe — about 3,200 pounds (1,470 kg)!

arxiv.org/abs/2410.02852 N'western student Danat Issa shows it's possible to get neutron-rich ejecta & r-process from collapsar accretion disks, given a high Mdot & a strong B-field threading the disk (yes, an assumption, but likely needed to power the GRB jets observed anyways)

Always grateful for the incredible support from the Fong Group at Northwestern team, both pictured and not pictured!

Happy holidays from the Fong Group & friends! 🎁 (📸 credit: Jill Rastinejad)

Still can’t quite believe it 🤩 extraordinarily honored and grateful to be amongst this fantastic NHFP 2025 cohort. 🚀 so excited to head back to the East Coast and join the University of Maryland! 🚀

Congratulations to CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow Lindsey Kwok and graduate student Jillian Rastinejad, for receiving highly competitive NASA Postdoctoral Fellowships! ciera.northwestern.edu/2025/04/10/cie…

If you care about science at NASA, this is royally sucks. arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/…