During my undergraduate I often read a site called Astrobites, which aims to bring front line research in Astronomy and Astrophysics to undergraduates via short, accessible articles written by graduate students. When I started my Ph.D I noticed that they were advertising for new writers and promptly applied. As part of the application I wrote a post about the EAGLE simulation, which I’ve started working on . I was fortunate enough to be accepted, and immediately given the date for my first post: Christmas Day. After some feedback from other Astrobite editors, and a little frantic Christmas Eve editing, I managed to publish it on time. It’s about an observational paper that came out this summer that claims to have glimpsed the light from the first generation of stars. I’m admittedly pretty proud of it; I didn’t even consider the possibility of contributing to this site when doing my undergraduate. I actually ended up learning a lot too; it’s interesting how much extra attention you pay when you are responsible for teaching others (or just afraid of being called out).

You can read the post here. The image below is of the galaxy CR7, the subject of the paper.