The glow on the lower right is sunlight reflecting off of dust from comets and asteroids in our solar system--our version of a debris disk. @nasaromantelescope.bsky.social will have a camera on board that might find the same dust around nearby stars also in their habitable zone. 🔭🧪

Don't give them ideas... xkcd.com/3225/

If you really feel that "it is not right that other Councils (and disciplinary areas), EPSRC most notably, are called upon to make cuts towards the end of the financial year to meet overruns from STFC." then ponder the impact on EPSRC if STFC balanced its books by cutting funding to DIAMOND or ISIS.

Wow. @pallabg.bsky.social has a obtained leaked document from STFC Council suggesting the origin of the STFC funding crisis was a deliberate decision (by?) 🧪🔭 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The future of UK Astronomy & Particle Physics is at risk from proposed 30% funding cuts that, if implemented, will be "genuinely catastrophic". Great to see this detailed BBC report on the issue by @pallabg.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️ #STFCcuts #SaveUKAstronomy 🗞️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

[2603.13081] Felipe Alarcón et al.: exoALMA. XXIV. Formaldehyde Emission in Protoplanetary Disks of exoALMA Compared with Their Properties and Dynamical State. link

[2603.12861] Myriam Benisty et al.: exoALMA XXI: The Morphology and Dynamics of Vertical Flows. link

[2603.13157] Andres F. Izquierdo et al.: exoALMA XX: Tomographic Detection of Embedded Planets in Protoplanetary Disks. link

[2603.13149] Alessandro Ruzza et al.: exoALMA XXIII. Estimating Disk and Planet Properties from Dust Morphologies with DBNets2.0. link

[2603.13015] Misato Fukagawa et al.: exoALMA XXII: A Two-dimensional Atlas of Deviations from Keplerian Disks. link

👏👏👏

Here is a copy of the open letter from the heads of physics departments across the UK- worth reading as it makes a lot of excellent points www.iop.org/about/news/o...

📢 @astroroyalscot.bsky.social, Prof. Jon Butterworth, & our rep for Early-Career Researchers, Simon Williams @si-wills.bsky.social will meet the SITC Committee next week to talk about the STFC funding! Let's all attend the hearing in person and online!🙎💻 committees.parliament.uk/event/26683/...

Cha IR nebula with #JWST 🔭 NIRCam (F300M, F460M). program: www.stsci.edu/jwst-program... #nebula #astronomy #starformation

STFC CEO responds to @jonbutterworth.bsky.social "it is important for all of our ... programmes ... to contribute to us making savings across our entire portfolio" No mention that *all* is disproportionately falling on the particle-astro-nuclear programme 🤷‍♀️😡 www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Are you interested in protoplanetary disk substructures and their role in planet formation? Come to our session at the EAS meeting this year! Abstract submission is open until March 2nd! More info: eas.unige.ch/EAS_meeting/...

🤨

For anyone in London next weekend - get yourself down to this absolutely wonderful combination of art & astronomy. It’s a really special place.

The future of fundamental physics research in the UK is under serious threat because of the massive government cuts to STFC funding. Please read this open letter by advanced fellows. advancedfellows-openletter-stfc.github.io/index.html

Very interesting to see this laid out by someone who was, until very recently, on STFC's Science Board.

Listeners to Radio 4’s Inside Science today get an essay from me in defence of astronomy as pure research. Please listen in and let me know what you think. Show starts 4.30pm GMT here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

Read our full response here: www.iop.org/about/news/v... The IOP have set up a mechanism to measure the impact of this news, and ask that anyone impacted to please complete this form and provide as much information as they can along with any evidence: www.iop.org/feedback-fol... (3/3)

Another positive is that the community response to the planned cuts 16 years ago actually had an effect. Some extra funding was found at the last minute. So, it is worth speaking out and pointing out these planned cuts will do a lot of damage to very active, and successful, research areas. 4/4

The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

We're so excited to share the results of the ALMA large program ARKS that studied the distribution of dust and gas in a sample of 24 exoKuiper belts. With @lucaroundtheworld.bsky.social, Meredith Hughes and a large collaboration, we just published 10 papers presenting our first results arkslp.org

Well this is worrying. NASA has maintained funding for ADS but not SciX (a broader database). In response, management is planning to *close* ADS in Feb 2026, forcing all users to switch to SciX. ☄️🔭 Funding info: ads.harvard.edu/adsug/2025/0... Transition plan: ads.harvard.edu/adsug/2025/0...

YEMS is hiring a postdoc to work on planet formation, exoplanet detection, high contrast imaging, and/or related topics. 🫸https://aas.org/jobregister/ad/811cf8bb

🔊Announcing a new Physics/Astro PhD scholarship scheme in Edinburgh, for students from a Black heritage, inc mixed Black background. Please help me spread the word. The scholarship covers all tuition fees, living costs & research travel. #blackinSTEM 🔭👩‍🔬⚛️ ℹ️: www.ph.ed.ac.uk/studying/pos...

We can see Io rotate slightly over the hour-long timelapse, tracking volcanoes on its surface! And check out the Conversation piece for a cool slider showing how NGC 1068 lines up perfectly with previous data from LBTI.

Great to see our paper on methanol in TW Hya finally come out today (with Catherine Walsh and Jenny Calahan). A quick overview.... 🔭 ☄️ #radioastro arxiv.org/abs/2510.04106

Methanol emission tracing ice chemistry and dust evolution in the TW Hya protoplanetary disk https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04106 John D. Ilee, Catherine Walsh, Jenny C. Calahan.

Today is a special paper day for me: for the first time we can do chemistry in a circumplanetary disk around a planetary-mass companion! Gabriele Cugno and I used JWST to tease out the signal of CT Cha b, finding a rich carbon chemistry (7 molecules + 1 isotopolog detected)! arxiv.org/abs/2509.15209

A very cool result! Julo+ with a paper on “Stellar halo subtraction … with integral field spectroscopy… on the PDS70, HTLup, and YSES1 systems” showing that the YSES 1b #exoplanet has a lot of emission lines - H alpha , H beta, He I, Ca H and K triplets, Na in absorption… oh my! #astrodon ☄

[2509.09450] Richard Teague et al.: A Radially Resolved Magnetic Field Threading the Disk of TW Hya. link

My periodic reminder for #astrosci #astrodon #exoplanets Early Career Researchers to please, please, please have a simple web site with your current email address on it - rationale here: kenworthy.space/advice/

Sending my apologies to the reviewer for this one… 😬

It is well within the power of journalists to simply stop interviewing this individual

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Lots of fun today at John Smeaton Academy talking all about science, art, radio astronomy & building planets onboard the amazing Moon Palace. Thanks for having us and for all the amazing questions!

[2506.16481] Francesco Zagaria et al.: SO emission in the dynamically perturbed protoplanetary disks around CQ Tau and MWC 758. link

I couldn’t agree more about those pretty public images… 😉 Sorry to have missed this great conference but huge thanks to everyone posting updates. It’s been great to follow along! #skao2025

First science talk at #skao2025 by Antonino Garufi about studying planet formation. Centimetre observations are critical to observing the growth of pebbles in planetary disks. 🧪 🔭 📡

[2506.10719] Ke Zhang et al.: The ALMA Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO): I. Program Overview and Summary of First Results. link

We are hosting the 2025 UK & Ireland Discs meeting at the University of Hertfordshire (8-10 September). Topics include discs of all sorts, but especially protoplanetary discs and white dwarf debris discs. Abstract submission deadline is 15 May: ukidiscs.github.io/discs2025/ 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

exoALMA. X. channel maps reveal complex $^{12}$CO abundance distributions and a variety of kinematic structures with evidence for embedded planets. Christophe Pinte et. al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18717

Happy #exoALMA day! www.exoalma.com

𝗡𝗼, 𝗮 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗞𝟮-𝟭𝟴𝗯'𝘀 𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲. K2-18b is back in the news, now with a bold claim that biosignature molecules (DMS and/or DMDS) have been 'detected at 3σ'. Most exoplanet astronomers are extremely sceptical about these claims, let's see why (1/n). 🔭🧪🪐 #exoplanet