Brandon Pries

Center for Relativistic Astrophysics,
Georgia Institute of Technology

bpries3@gatech.edu

Astrobites

I'm currently a writer for Astrobites, a volunteer organization of astronomy graduate students. We aim to summarize astronomy research papers into bite-sized articles that are more digestable by the general public, with our primary audience being physics and astronomy undergraduates.

Published Astrobites

  1. S. Grayson, C. Meldorf, B. Pries, & W. Smith. "Guide to ΛCDM." Astrobites, January 6, 2025. [Astrobites]
  2. B. Pries (ed. A. Whitford). "Over the Limit: Accretion and Feedback of Early Black Holes." Astrobites, December 25, 2024. [Astrobites]
  3. B. Pries (ed. W. Golay). "Big Black Holes in Little Galaxies." Astrobites, November 8, 2024. [Astrobites]
  4. B. Pries (ed. A. Anderson). "Heavy Metal: Actinides from Compact Object Mergers." Astrobites, November 2, 2024. [Astrobites]
  5. B. Pries (ed. C. Slaughter). "Weight Gain: Growing Little Black Holes in the Early Universe." Astrobites, September 24, 2024. [Astrobites]
  6. B. Pries (ed. A. Sinha). "New Species of Dwarf Galaxy in the Galaxy Cluster Ecosystem?" Astrobites, September 10, 2024. [Astrobites]
  7. B. Pries (ed. S. Grayson). "A Universal Accounting Problem: Tension in Reionization Estimates." Astrobites, August 17, 2024. [Astrobites]
  8. B. Pries (ed. V. Bonidie). "Blowout: AGNs Quenching Star Formation in Dwarf Galaxies." Astrobites, June 6, 2024. [Astrobites]
  9. Astrobites Collaboration (incl. B. Pries, ed. M. Vincent). "2024 Album of the Year: A Total Eclipse of the Sun." Astrobites, April 11, 2024. [Astrobites]
  10. B. Pries (ed. A. Masegian). "Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies: Not as Small as We Thought?" Astrobites, April 1, 2024. [Astrobites]
  11. B. Pries (ed. E. Clarke, N. Korhonen Cuestas). "Detecting Ghostly Neutrinos that Skim Earth's Crust." Astrobites, February 8, 2024. [Astrobites]

Astrobite Editing

  1. J. Lubin (ed. B. Pries). "What Role Does Planet Orbital Eccentricity Play On Planet Habitability?" Astrobites, March 24, 2025. [Astrobites]
  2. N. Sharei (ed. B. Pries). "Echoes of the First Light: A Mysterious Metal-Poor Galaxy at Cosmic Dawn." Astrobites, March 10, 2025. [Astrobites]
  3. F. Natsheh (ed. B. Pries). "UR: Something from Nothing: Analyzing JWST Pixel Data." Astrobites, December 14, 2024. [Astrobites]
  4. C. von Raesfeld (ed. B. Pries). "Book Review: Research is Ceremony." Astrobites, November 29, 2024. [Astrobites]
  5. C. Meldorf (ed. B. Pries). "Live Fast, Die Young, Bad Gals Do It Well." Astrobites, October 23, 2024. [Astrobites]
  6. S. Panjkov (ed. B. Pries). "Are Giant Stars Stealing Lithium from Their Neighbours?" Astrobites, October 17, 2024. [Astrobites]
  7. N. Korhonen Cuestas (ed. B. Pries). "Under (Ram) Pressure! Stripping Galaxies Of Their Gas." Astrobites, August 6, 2024. [Astrobites]
  8. L. Rowland (ed. B. Pries). "The photocopied "sunburst" from the early Universe." Astrobites, April 17, 2024. [Astrobites]
  9. C. Slaughter (ed. B. Pries, K. Rockliffe). "Small but Mighty: Disk Chemistry in an M-Dwarf System." Astrobites, February 19, 2024. [Astrobites]

Outreach Presentations

I've given a handful of outreach presentations regarding my research to other physics and astronomy undergraduates, including groups like the Society of Physics Students (SPS) and the MSU Astronomy Club.

  1. B. Pries. "Constraining WIMP Annihilation Rates via Neutrinos." Astronomy Club, MSU (virtual), March 20, 2023.
  2. B. Pries. "Detecting Neutrinos from WIMPs." SPS, MSU, October 21, 2021.
  3. B. Pries. "Recurrent Neural Networks for Low-Energy Neutrino Interaction Reconstruction." SPS, MSU (virtual), October 8, 2020.

Media Appearances

  1. Quoted in "Astronomers really like the South Pole, but why?" by B. Lewis. Popular Science, September 5, 2024. [PopSci]