Start of the Evry Schatzman school on Stellar Physics in the PLATO era !

This week I am going to Aussois to give a lecture at the Évry Schatzman school of stellar physics ! ✨ I am travelling by train from Catania, first step the Catania-Rome night train with the Messina's strait crossing ! 🚂

J'aurais toujours en tête (c'était quelques années avant le début de la mobilisation contre LVMH) cet amphi obligatoire complètement lunaire où un Bernard Arnault apathique était venu nous raconter des anecdotes sur sa fière jeunesse à l'École.

Gargantuan Gaia review by Michael Perryman "271 pages, 126 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Reports" arxiv.org/abs/2509.10883

We have job opportunities in the APEx department at MPIA - please spread the word! Postdocs: aas.org/jobregister/... Tenure-track staff: aas.org/jobregister/... Max Planck Research Group Leaders: aas.org/jobregister/... + happy to host ERC, Humboldt, and other third-party funds.

J'arrête (vraiment) le recensement des plagiats d'Etienne Klein. Ça ne fait plus vraiment sens. Tout est là : plus de 70 auteurs plagiés par l’une des figures scientifiques les plus médiatisées. Soit une pratique frauduleuse ancrée, massive, systématique. ⏩ Le doc docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Awesome photos ! We are getting closer ! 🤩

Ça ressemble encore à une superbe idée tout ça 🤦‍♂️

Realising that Italian is slowly beginning to contaminate my English as I wrote (several times) "confrontation" instead of "comparison"...

After nearly a decade of saying which JWST result I was most excited about, it's here: JWST SPECTRA OF THE HABITABLE TRAPPIST-1 PLANETS! TRAPPIST-1 E!!! IT'S ... A FLAT LINE! BUT NOT AS FLAT AS IT COULD BE!? IS THERE AN ATMOSPHERE?!?!? WE STILL DON'T KNOWWWWW. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

Standard Catania observatory morning routine when the coffee machines of the building are down because the company that manages them decided for some reason not to pay their electricity bill ☕

So, for a manuscript on which I am co-author, I just spent too much time redoing a matplotlib figure so it looks like it is IDL-made because the referee wanted all figures to have similar styles... (Referees, please don't do this 🙏)

Huge crowd in Catania to support the departure of the Gaza Sumud Flotilla

Update on the atmosphere vs no atmosphere debate for TRAPPIST-1 b and c -- here's a nice and (IMO) conclusive result from Gillon and Ducrot et al.: no thick atmosphere on either planet. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02128

Mood

Always a nice view to have from the lab 🌋

Some very beautiful 3D simulations of turbulence in protoplanetary discs on today's arXiv ! ☄️ arxiv.org/abs/2508.20839

Are you an early-career scientist or engineer? Then the ESA Research #Fellowships in Space Science might be just the right opportunity for you. Check out the programme details here 👉 www.cosmos.esa.int/web/space-sc... 🔭 🧪 ☄️

New paper day! 🔥 George Cherry et al. develop the Most Significant Frequency/Wavenumber method for detecting wave activity in realistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Sun's atmosphere. Published in A&A: www.aanda.org/articles/aa/... (1/4)

Le trou noir supermassif au centre de la galaxie à l'origine du célèbre mirage gravitationnel "du Fer à Cheval" est l'un des plus gros jamais mesurés Dans une étude récemment publiée dans Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, sa masse est estimée à 36 milliards de masses solaires 1/2

Lu dans @mediapart.fr ce matin. Comment ressentir autre chose qu'une rage intense et profonde envers les responsables d'une situation pareille ?

A very hungry planet! 🪐 What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞 Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets 📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

Today on arXiv, asteroseismic modelling of Kepler main-sequence solar-type stars. ☄️ As often, F-type stars have decided not to behave ! 😅 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18016

Today on arXiv, a study on the subgiant and "young" red giant stars of Kepler, which have oscillation frequencies close to the Nyquist frequency of the satellite ! #astrosci #stellarastro arxiv.org/abs/2508.15654

Spending the day at our campus observatory, doing some cleaning and maintenance, and pondering how our profession survives the next few (many?) years

What happens if you combine @esa.int's Gaia satellite's variable star classifications with open clusters? 🔭☄️🧪 #stellarastro In paper #2 out today, Richard Anderson & I collaborated on doing just that and seeing what we could learn! There are tons of pretty plots and insights, so let's dive in ⤵️

This is devastating, and part of a larger move to entirely push science out of NASA's mission. It is horrific betrayal of so much work, not to mention the fact that it violates NASA's charter.

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

A super interesting read about the stellar evolution code MESA, the legacy to the stellar astrophysics community of the late Bill Paxton. And it emphasises that we desperately need more efforts to develop and maintain open-source softwares in our field. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/12/a...

#ESAAriel will study no less than 1000 exoplanets in our galaxy. Its observations will tell us more about: ✅ the ingredients of exoplanets' atmospheres ✅ the presence of clouds ✅ weather conditions changes Discover more at esa.int/ariel 🔭

tag urself. I'm "suspected passive technology" - do not perceive me

Au delà de ça est ce qu'on pourrait aussi arrêter de donner du crédit à un gars qui dit littéralement "Dans 10 ans des gens vont faire des trucs cool". C'est vraiment sa marque de fabrique de balancer des conneries évasives et de voir tous les crétins l'applaudir à deux mains.

Probably best to laugh about the level of hubris reached 🤡

Is this about academia

I see the first articles in the UK press giving space to the claim that 3I/ATLAS is an alien spacecraft. Briefly: It’s a comet that formed billions of years ago, passing through our Solar System. It’s behaving like a comet. There is no evidence it’s artificial.

The Alpha Centauri System ⭐ ⭐, the closest star system to our own solar system, system contains two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and a faint red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the only star of the system confirmed to host three confirmed planets. (1/7) 🧵 🔭 🧪

J'ai par hasard remis la main sur un numéro de Science & Vie de juin 2007 (j'avais 11 ans...) sur les exoplanètes et je dois dire que c'est assez amusant de regarder le chemin parcouru en 18 ans: à l'époque "seulement" 230 planètes connues, pas de Kepler, CoRoT venait juste d'être lancé !

Call for Astronomy, astrophysics and space science Editors at the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) blog.joss.theoj.org/2025/08/call...

Always super fun to see the imprints of the TESS, Kepler and K2 fields on such visualisations !

What might we expect to see during @esa.int Solar Orbiter's upcoming remote-sensing windows; now with an inclined orbit. Here's the PFSS connectivity of Orbiter during the remote-sensing window of spring 2026 (17th Feb to 6th March), using the current coronal magnetic field and in-situ wind speeds.

William Rowan Hamilton was born #OTD in 1805. His reformulation of classical mechanics in terms of a variational principle played an essential role in the development of field theories and quantum mechanics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

It's paper time ! It was published on A&A a few days ago, we have been looking for possible super-close non-transiting exoplanets in the Kepler data 🪐⭐ www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

New paper day! See et al. explores how the large-scale magnetic fields of low-mass stars (0.2-1.3 solar mass) vary as a function of stellar rotation and convective turnover time. Victor focuses on the latest Zeeman-Doppler imaging of slowly rotating M-dwarfs. arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16986 (1/4)

And once upon a time I thought that French administration was complicated to deal with...

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610 We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

Top three mysteries our Plato mission will investigate: 🌎 Does Earth have a twin? 🌅 What's the sky like on exoplanets? 🐣 What do the insides of stars look like? Discover more 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭

Vera C. Rubin was born #OTD in 1928. Her study of rotation curves in galaxies provided strong evidence for dark matter haloes. Her observations of peculiar motions of galaxies also supported the existence of superclusters. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Ru...

Does an Earth look-alike exist? Our Plato mission will take us one step closer to answering that question. It will focus its search on bright Sun-like stars to detect and define possible Earth look-alikes in the Universe 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭

Spot a logo that gives off superhero vibes? 😉 Meet "Fantastic 4MOST", which will soon join our league of extraordinary instruments. @4most-eu.bsky.social comes packed with superpowers. Discover them: www.eso.org/public/image... 📷 ESO/4MOST/Steffen Frey 🔭 🧪 #instrumentation