This is a good idea.

A third giant planet for beta Pictoris! arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23801 arxiv.org/abs/2606.23789 It was fun to have an early first look at this result as a reviewer. Excellent papers.

Scientific American is being sold to LabX Media, publisher of Discover: group.springernature.com/gp/group/med... They've fired me and other union staff, ahead of June 26 vote ratification. My rates are suddenly more reasonable, if you need editing or reporting - [email protected]

Keck/NIRC2 observing with the new HAKA adaptive optics upgrade. 0.36" seeing. Looking good so far.

It’s now official: Avi Loeb is the RFK Jr. of astrophysics. 🧪

Subaru Telescope schedule for S26B announced. SCExAO proposals for which I am PI or the Sr. Co-I on were allocated 10 nights this semester & I'm Co-I on another ~6 (89% of all SCExAO time). Here comes the data! www.naoj.org/cgi-bin/opec... www.naoj.org/Proposals/Pa...

asking this too for "no apparent reason ..."

Today, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope leaves NASA Goddard for the Port of Baltimore to begin its journey to the Kennedy Space Center. This August, Roman will launch into space, broadening our understanding of our solar system & universe. Excited to see it on the move!

Thread on our new paper on arxiv today! We stumbled across a weird sinusoidal systematic that we think appears in every observation from the NIRISS instrument on JWST. We derive a correction and see how much it impacts exoplanet spectra. (1/N) #astro #exoplanets 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.11983

Excellent thread on multiple levels of absurdity impacting ECRs without citizenship. @gmduvvuri.bsky.social and others like him deserve better:

SCExAO observing night #2 done. The PSF looks a little bit ugly but that's because we had 3-4" seeing!!!!

In a referee's report I recently submitted, I emphasized the the evil that is passive voice and verbosity in scientific papers. I told the authors to look at a certain George Carlin monologue as a salty, colorful example of why these things are bad. Here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1kK...

One of my favorite systems. AB Aurigae is awesome.

In a statement to @benmullin.bsky.social, Scott Pelley disputes what Bari Weiss said in this morning's editorial meeting, claiming he was never offered "a way back" as she claimed. "These executives cannot gain the trust of the staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for..."

He is a truly excellent journalist.

Oh the stories I've heard from ECRs at other institutions about some of my colleagues ...

hmm, so I guess YSES 1b is a brown dwarf? Looks like we need to be very careful about classifying wide-separation things that show evidence for circumsubstellar disk.

Happy to say that my second paper “Astrometric exoplanet detection survives solar-like stellar contamination” has been accepted by MNRAS and is now up on the arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18953 Takeaway: Missions like TOLIMAN and SHERA could find earth-twins assuming solar like noise.

less than 24 hrs after a mag 6.0 earthquake in Hawaii, Subaru is back on sky and doing great science on Maunakea. See below our redetection of the HIP 71618 B brown dwarf (Roman CGI tech demo target) and HIP xxxx B (new unreported discovery), both in the raw quicklook data.

Henceforth, I shall call AB Aurigae b a "quantum planet". Because ... why not?

Belated anniversary of the posting of our review article on Exoplanet Direct Imaging. ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ASPC... If you're getting started in the field, need references for some core concepts and foundational results, or are just curious ... this may be a good place to start.

Microsoft researchers find that for non-programming tasks, LLM agents aren't ready for work. For long, truly complex work, they're only currently ready for Python programming. It's great that MS researchers have the independence to publish papers like this.

2024 global temperature record is consistent with model-predicted warming: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... -> Heating Up to Expectations: michaelmann.net/heating-up-t... (for the controversy about accelerated global warming or not see the links in skyweek.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/a... at the bottom).

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...

eek

New space telescope coming soon to the skies near you! 🔭

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027. By the end of its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to amass a 20,000-terabyte data archive. #NASARoman

New: Former NSF leaders and NSB chairs have sent a letter to OSTP and Senate leadership, with two requests: -address the NSF directorship vacancy -"quickly seat a highly qualified new National Science Board"

I did not know this.

Sen. Moran recently said that FY26 is the starting point for the FY27 budget, not the PBR. So yes hopefully the Senate comes in high and we end up with a decent budget.

My all-time favourite method of debugging is going to bed and looking at it again the next morning.

A slide from my Exoplanets course lecture today demo'ing end-to-end direct imaging data reduction, starting from the raw Keck/NIRC2 data published in Marois et al. (2010, Nature): The four HR 8799 planets detected with @thejason.wang 's open source PyKLIP code, my own code, and the published image

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

GPS satellites move at 1/100000 the speed of light, causing their clocks to tick slower by 7 microseconds per day, and orbit at a height that makes their clocks tick faster by 45 microseconds per day. Two relativistic effects, both at the 1 part in 10 billion level, both essential for GPS accuracy 🧪

And just to be abundantly clear: NASA AND SCIENCE IN GENERAL HAVE MASSIVE RETURN ON INVESTMENT. Cutting this budget is a net financial LOSS in the medium- to long-term. It undermines our future -- intellectually, technologically, and economically.

NSF is one of the best ideas that the US government has had post WW2. And Russell Vought -- the dude pushing for this dismantling this idea-- is one of the worst appointees of the current administration or any administration in recent memory.

Ouch ...

I've seen enough horror movies to know this is a really bad idea

🔭🪐 my team took this image of 29 Cygni b, a super giant planet 130 light years from us, with JWST. we found some interesting clues that suggest that this planet (~15x the mass of Jupiter) accreted more than 100 times the mass of the Earth in carbon- and oxygen-rich material during its formation

ouch

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON IM GONNA CRYYY 😭😭😭

Our Assistant or Associate Professor of Instruction position (emph on cosmology and/or relativity) is now up on the AAS Jobs Register aas.org/jobregister/... Note the short turnaround for submitting an application (Apr 30!).

Accelerating star surveys with SCExAO strike again! This time a work led by Uyama-san identifying a potential GJ229B-like companion (or something else strange going on) arxiv.org/abs/2604.03767

Our dept at UTSA invites applicants for a full-time, fixed-term Assistant/Associate Professor of Instruction position. This is a teaching position involving undergraduate courses in astronomy and/or physics, w/ emphasis on Cosmology and Relativity courses. bit.ly/4sjCi1V

For all the coronagraph fans out there: I'm pleased to share our paper (led by @mattkenworthy.bsky.social) on the design & performance of the Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph for the ERIS instrument at the Very Large Telescope + our recommendations for using it to study exoplanets & brown dwarfs 🪐🔭

A new solar system in the making? For the second time ever, two planets have been directly observed forming around a host star. Our VLT and VLTI have helped astronomers confirm the presence of a second gas giant orbiting the star WISPIT 2.  More: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2604/ 🔭 🧪

Pro tip: when writing a proposal, write an introduction that, you know,*introduces* the topic to a reviewer who might not be thinking of your specialty every waking hour of their day. A good introduction, that also shows that you know what others are doing on the problem, really helps a proposal.

Steward teams are building instruments for Lazuli — a new space telescope launching by 2029 as part of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Our adaptive optics will image giant exoplanets nearly a billion times dimmer than their host stars! bit.ly/4dkXYH1

Here come the cold giants! A combination of RV and astrometry reveals several "Jupiter analogues", among them one planet (around HIP 39330, a G5V star, ca. 100 ly away) that matches Jupiter quite nicely: a=5.05 au, e=0.078, M=1.67 M_jup. If only we could quickly check for terrestrial planets inside!

Happy Blacker Friday (er, Lotz Friday?) ... ... to those who celebrate (or mourn, depending on your proposal outcome?).