Has any team called out its fans so much in its Super Bowl post game celebration? Seattle has made its fandom and its city so much a part of its formula, I love it! bsky.app/profile/astr...

So, if the dark sector has interactions that lets some of the dark matter form stars, planets, and astrophysicists, their cosmology is pretty interesting! What they call "dark matter" is 10% of the universe, dissipative, and creates dynamical friction for supermassive black holes. 🔭🧪

GW BlueSky: When black holes merge, a lot of their mass is lost as GWs. M12<M1+M2 Is this also true when a non-BH merges with a BH? Like a neutron star? Or an asteroid? Is a merger *required* for this to happen? Could a close flyby rob a BH of some (tiny part) of its mass? 🔭🧪

I'll point out that the Seahawks logo—especially the original logo—is a nod to a style of bird iconography on totem poles in PNW indigenous traditions. In contrast to other sports teams' controversial appropriation of Native imagery, the Seahawks' logo seems to me to be respectful and appreciated.

"…the concrete melts into the abstract…prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and ore and more phrases tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house." 1/3

Orwell would have hated LLMs *so much*. In his classic essay Politics and the English Language he laid out his philosophy of writing and its intersection with political extremism, including fascism, and blamed mindless writing for much of its spread. 🧵 www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-f...

Featuring Cyrielle Opitom, who's been leading our 3I/ATLAS observing campaign with several instruments on the mighty VLT

Taught A (11) Tom Swifty jokes and he’s on a tear writing his own (I think?). Best one so far: “I’m enjoying my job as a carpenter for a kitchen renovation company,“ Tom said counterproductively.

Ooooh, this looks very useful for faculty (like me) converting their LaTeX'd course files into an accessible format. Curious if anyone has installed it and tried it on a Mac? Any tips or suggestions? 🧪🔭

I felt the same way about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel prize. He did not need it to validate his poetry, but him getting it validated the more obscure awardees as belonging among the highest rank of poets.

Love him or hate him, electing Belichick into the Hall of Fame is the sort of decision that validates the award itself, not the awardee. He doesn’t need the Hall to go down as one of the greatest. The other inductees deserve to have their name next to his.

💯 it starts at the college level in Seattle. As Huskies- we root for WSU if they play a rival to our state. WSU is like the Pats- they will cheer for one team and if you don’t they will tell you how you aren’t a real fan of your team. We’re ready for Superbowl 😘

Absolutely absurd. The way these minor violations got blown up by the league is so silly. Low ball pressure is the equivalent of jaywalking. Videotaping a person gesticulating in front of tens of thousands of people live and on national television is…wrong, sure, but hardly worthy of this.

May I suggest that we take our science to the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences meeting? The DPS never lost focus on inclusivity and advocacy. If we move there together, we can update and expand the community of science focus. aas.org/meetings/58t...

A thread on my view of the differences between #Seahawks and #Patriots fandom.

I lived in Seattle until I was 13. Dad lives there. My mom lives there. Two brothers live there. I lived in Boston from 13-21. Learned to love sports there. The last Seahawks-Patriots SB I found myself rooting for New England. Either way, I'll love the game and happy with the outcome!

My textbook on SETI is published! Please see if your libraries offer a free download—mine does! iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/97... If so, you can order hardcopies for around $30 each. Otherwise, you can buy copies here: store.ioppublishing.org/page/detail/... I hope you like it!

Hey fellow older astronomers: Did [email protected] ever reveal themself? Do we know who they were?🔭 The rumor mill is quite the legacy…

This is very cool! I was surprised that we never learn in the final cut what the Deacon said that set Jud off and the movie's events into motion. Was it just a red herring, or a detail cut for length? The word "Deacon" never appears again in this script so apparently not edited out after shooting…

Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin’s autobiography is just amazing. Every astronomer should read it. Here she is talking about her memories of Annie Jump Cannon.

This board game is amazing! It's super complicated and VERY true to the science. Every astrobiologist board game geek should get a copy! I'm SO impressed at the research behind this game. I would LOVE to review this game! Anyone know how/where I could do that? boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41... 🔭🧪

Work hack: Put common LaTeX commands into the "text replacement" option on a Mac. In the rare case you want to type these literally, you can just use ESC after typing. (They magically don't interfere with Overleaf, and putting in lower case Greek letters makes upper case work, too!)

Wrote up a bit about the textbook. One of the reasons I wrote it is to give others a foundation to confidently teach SETI as a course. At Penn State the courses are Astro 476 (for majors) and 576 (for astrobiology grad students). If you try it out, hit me up for the "teacher's edition"!

My textbook on SETI is published! I hope you like it! Please see if your libraries offer a free download—mine does! iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/97... 🧪🔭

Naive question: How well constrained is the amount of mass in SMBHs that is due to accreted dark matter? Do limits from galaxy dynamics and/or large scale structure put limits on how efficiently BHs can accrete dark matter? Is it possible that some SMBHs are dark-matter dominated? 🔭🧪

A note on this in case it helps others: Finishing this book was VERY CHALLENGING for me. I think I generally draft and edit easily and quickly (once I know clearly what I want to say) but the scope of this book was so imposing that it defeated my usual mental rubrics, which it stalled for YEARS.

tagging 🔭🧪

Now that work on my textbook is done and I'm out of writing jail, I'm working on a backlog of other writing projects. Here's a fun one! NEID observed the 2023 October solar eclipse, and monitored the H-alpha and Ca II H&K lines—which changed strength during the eclipse.

Read more about the bills passed yesterday (aas.org/posts/news/2...), and thank your members of Congress today! aas.org/action-alert...

All of this. I know a lot of people think Ancient Aliens is harmless fun. It certainly can be fun (I say this as a fan of Weekly World News!) but it has definitely not been harmless.

They say you should never meet your heroes, but… I'm reading Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin's auto-ish biography and so far she's exceeding my mental image of her. She and Sergey Gaposhkin took in a Japanese family to save them from internment in a concentration camp! 🔭🧪

Final proofs of the textbook are in! Should be available…soon I hope? store.ioppublishing.org/page/detail/...

Adventures in copy editing: The fractional degree in the term "0°.04 pixel" in my textbook first got typeset as "0. 04 pixel", then after I flagged it it was "corrected" to "0.04 pixel", then after I missed that it was further "corrected" to "1/25 pixel". Glad I caught it in 3rd proofs!

I am also pleased to report that the furry convention doesn’t end until tomorrow.

For astronomers arriving in Phoenix for #ExoPAG33 and #AAS247, if you’re wondering what the heck is going on in the vicinity of the Phoenix Convention Center: Painted Desert Fur Con 2026 at the Sheraton Phoenix Jan 2-4 painteddesertfc.org

I am pleased to report that, today at least, #aas247 attendees appear to be sharing the convention center and Sheraton lobby bar with a furry convention.

This is so good. I definitely misread that scene! Mary ends up a spinster in the alternate timeline not because he was not around to save her, but because he wasn't around for her to build up and love. It is her strength, not her life, that is wasted without him. www.thebulwark.com/p/there-is-n...

This is an almost shockingly wise essay. I'm glad I've finally read it.

Forgot to tag 🧪🔭!

Christmas on the archive! @ericmamajek.bsky.social leads a paper with his usual precision, asking us astronomers (especially exoplanet folks) to clean up their jargon. Introducing the Solirad: the nominal average flux the Earth receives from the Sun = 1361 W/m^2 arxiv.org/abs/2512.20126

My take on NFL rule changes is that they should make defense much easier (loosen PI rules for instance) and also be much less prescriptive about how the offense must run. Let teams get clever again to get around tough D. Bring back the fumblerooski. Why not let offenses advance a fumble?

The last few were both big hits: When We Were Kings—all the drama of a Rocky genre film, and also a documentary about probably the most important fight in boxing. Bonus for lots of Ali trash talk. Waiting for Bobby Fischer—perfect kids movie for my budding chess nerd. Bonus for real characters.

Just saw It’s a Wonderful Life at our old-timey theater downtown. It is still just a perfect film. I’m blown away and surprised at how good it is every time I watch it. Would be really interesting someday to do a doubleheader with Back to the Future part II! So many references…

For 3I/ATLAS's closest approach to Earth, have an accepted paper: as it got closer to the Sun, 3I's production of atomic nickel and iron in its coma evolved to a ratio like that of Solar System comets and 2I ☄️🔭 Hutsemékers et al. A&A arxiv.org/abs/2509.26053

Yes! This is a HUGE issue in SETI where many social scientists and other non-physicists have contributed influential ideas in the astrophysics, and astrophysicists have contributed many influential ideas in the social sciences. The results are decidedly mixed. Get co-authors in fields new to you!

Ahead of 3I/ATLAS's closest approach to Earth (at nearly 2 au) tomorrow, here's our Elaine P. Snowden Fellow @astrohopkins.bsky.social on how we determined 3I's age 🇳🇿☄️🔭

A nice overview from our media folks of the theoretical and observational work our team has out so far on interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS ☄️

Accepted papers thus far - several more still in peer review, or underway

For @newscientist.com subscribers--which includes library users who access content online!--here is my Christmas 2025 column! "As a cosmologist who knows she isn’t an expert on comets, I believe all of the experts who say that, without a doubt, comet 3I/Atlas isn’t an alien object." 🔭🧪🙏🏽👀

One way that the reaction to Rob Reiner's murder mirrors Charlie Kirk's is that the best way to eulogize each of them is to quote their words, and in both cases, doing so pisses off conservatives.