This might be subtitled “Skeletons from the N-body closet”! (shamelessly borrowing from Salmon and Warren). A reminder that even the “simplest” computational astrophysics problem has a great deal of depth and subtlety.

New paper! In work led by Matteo Cantiello @flatironinstitute.org we predict an instability strip for quasi-stars, which we argue is consistent with the observed variability properties of JWST’s Little Red Dots. arxiv.org/abs/2512.17997

New paper, led by Jake Hassan, on the structure and evolution of quasi-stars: accreting black holes embedded in massive envelopes. This is a model for the growth of black hole seeds, and, maybe 🤞, for JWSTs “Little Red Dots”. Time will tell… arxiv.org/abs/2510.18301

Polka-dotted Stars II: Starspots and obliquities of Kepler-17 and Kepler-63. Sabina Sagynbayeva et. al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07130

With Navin Tsung and collaborators, we show how magnetic fields can effectively suppress gravitational instability and fragmentation in AGN accretion disks. arxiv.org/abs/2507.21991

A timely paper for #HWO25: is it enough to find Earth-like planets around other nearby stars? No! We need their planetary system contexts. Does life on Earth depend on Jupiter? @sabinastro.bsky.social led this nice analysis of HWO requirements to detect Earths + Jupiters. arxiv.org/abs/2507.21443

Me and hubby discussing the new LIGO discovery of ginormous merging black holes. Me to 3 yo: Nico, do you like black holes? 3 yo: No, I like YouTube. Hubby: well, that's kinda a hybrid black/white hole: light comes out but no information 🤣 Happy #NerdyTuesday! 🧪 @philip-armitage.bsky.social

In work led by Alessandro Ruzza, we use a new simulation-based inference approach to estimate masses of disk embedded planets from ALMA data. arxiv.org/abs/2506.11200

From today’s ethics training I learned that the threshold for a nominal gift in New York State is $15. The temptation to ask about jumbo jets was strong…

Thread on our simulation work on circumplanetary disks, led by @sabinastro.bsky.social with Alexandra Kuznetsova and Yan-Fei Jiang from @flatironinstitute.org. We’re working to understand when such disks form, and what their structure looks like as we zoom in closer to the planet.

😂🤣

If you too are experiencing mental health issues due to the ongoing shitshow, please DM me or Signal me at ziadadina.19, I am trying to build a community to help each other. Y'all, please repost and help me out, this is serious stuff

Revised version of a new, short (-ish!) review on planet formation theory: arxiv.org/abs/2412.11064

New paper, led by the amazing @becastro.bsky.social (with Jeremy Smallwood, Andrew Winter, @astrohoss.bsky.social, and others). In which we try to understand the formation of the crazy-looking young planetary system IRAS04125... 🤔 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2504.07182

Daniel Carrera, Linn Eriksson and collaborators study a “hybrid” mode of planetesimal formation, in which the growth of dust in vortices ultimately drives the system into the collapse regime of streaming instability parameter space. arxiv.org/abs/2504.06332