Q: Does my thesis adviser pick the snake? A: No. Your adviser just tells the guy who picks the snakes how good your thesis was.

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

Here we go! Gaia DR4 now has an official release date: 2 December 2026. If you have been following the Gaia Mission closely, you will know that DR4 has had a sliding release date, from the end of 2025, to mid 2026 to "end of 2026". But now the date is locked. www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dat...

An ominous slug looms over its prey

Happy perfect date day!!! With #alttext

The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out. We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal. This is another extinction-level event for NASA science. Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science

Mooooooon (ok mostly Earth so far)

🔭 Paper day, and it’s a big one! We have found the most metal-poor object known in the universe. It’s a star, and it comes to us from our nearby friend the Large Magellanic Cloud. Out in Nature Astronomy today: rdcu.be/fbylI

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

SADLY my April Fool’s paper on this topic has been desk rejected by arxiv moderators!!

It’s truly insane that an object with metallicity upper limit <2% solar is being claimed as containing Pop III stars

As the Roman Proposal Lead, I think I'm not allowed to ask folks to bet on the final number of submissions for #RomanCycle1 right? 🤔

🔭 Paper day! Ani Chiti + MAGIC discovery the first highly carbon-enhanced star in an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. We suggest most CEMP stars form in such places. News article: news.uchicago.edu/story/ancien... Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Arxiv version (updated soon): arxiv.org/abs/2508.04053

Owing (probably) to some form of administrative error, I have made it to the final of the St Patrick’s Day Beard of Ireland competition. If you'd like to vote for me you can do so below. Please feel free to share the link. bsky.app/profile/keit...

🔭 Storytime! This paper consumed my soul for a month and it turns out that you have to look at your 2D spectroscopic data. Thread... ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024OJAp...

At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion). Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."

NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory 🔭 has issued its first scientific alerts, marking a historic milestone in astrophysics. Expected to increase to seven million alerts per night (!!!), these first alerts start a new era of dynamic, real-time observation of the night sky. More: noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Wise words from the hoardings on the building site of the new Graz Centre for Physics

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...

Caltech astrophysicist fatally shot on porch in Antelope Valley; suspect charged with murder

🔥🐎 here we come!

After a year of protests from astronomers, authorities have abandoned plans for a giant, light-polluting renewable-energy facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert

First* stars** *many generations after Pop III **star clusters

Gotta find those PISNe

Good lord it has only been a week of 2026

After the killing of Ms Good, Greg Bovino of the CPB led a raid on a Minneapolis HS. An official there said: They don’t care. They’re just animals,” I’ve never seen people behave like this.” All MPLS schools now closed for the week. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Rocks are not a given!!

Slack really does not need to wish me happy new year especially once in every workspace good lord

NSF now planning to let POs largely decide what gets funded, and to send PIs reviews that are only 3-5 sentences long. They don't have to use outside reviewers (except maybe 1) and don't have to convene panels. (1/5)

Remember that lovely aurora last week? Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱 🧵

Have you ever wanted @astropy.org tutorials on: – spectroscopic data reduction from a raw FITS image, – computing galactic orbits from Gaia measurements, – cross-matching astronomical catalogs? Check out the redesigned learn.astropy.org! Announcement from @numfocus.bsky.social below. 🧪🔭 #astrocode

🫠🫠🫠

Two very interesting papers about dark energy on the arXiv today, both very relevant to the ongoing interest in possibly evolving DE as suggested by the DESI results 🔭🧪 Here's the first and potentially more explosive one: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07517

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

THE RETURN OF GOOGLE READER PLEASE

30 people disappeared in this shaded area today.

More coverage of OSU’s new restrictions on conference attendance: “These conferences are open forums for us to present our work, network and collaborate. Telling us that they’re going to regulate whether or not we can participate feels very stifling, prohibitive,” said @ohdearz.bsky.social

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

Are you someone who is interested in astronomy graduate school? This is a list of many/most departments and their expectations for admissions this year. Please feel free to spread it far and wide. If you are doing admissions and you'd like to update your entry, reach out as per the form!

MIT refuses to accept White House terms for funding, other schools still mulling reut.rs/471tkNZ

I booked a photo session tonight bc I have very few pictures of my family together, but while I’m smiling & holding my children, I know I will hear this mother’s screams. I don’t want my tax dollars supporting ICE agents dragging parents away from car line. And most moms in the US agree with me.

I’ve been asked to advise undergrads on how to get into grad school and this is all I can think about musgrave.substack.com/p/dont-do-a-...

Armed, masked thugs are kidnapping our neighbors and terrorizing our communities This was in front of an elementary school in the West Loop in Chicago today. Sharing because everyone needs to see what is happening here daily Originally posted by @erynfreepress on IG. Her story is in the alt text

I’m no expert, but we did go from coding in binary -> assembly -> FORTRAN/C -> Java/C++ -> Python/R. At each step we traded raw efficiency(/energy cost) for user convenience. It does take different thinking and teaching/learning for each step. LLM coding seems like it will be the next step..

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.

"There's artificial intelligence, and then there's actual intelligence."

For those frantically trying to submit their Gemini proposals tonight, it’s broken: www.gemini.edu/news/science...

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night: Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at? **pause** Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

R.I.P. George F. Smoot (1945-2025) We will no doubt read many official obituaries in days to come, but all I can say is that he was a character, a very original thinker, a fine scientist, and a very nice man. Along with many others, I will miss him enormously.