my main takeaway from being in China is that the close door button on elevators actually work and they expect you to use them

Comet 67P lmao

New Paper Klaxon🚨 I am super excited to share this one which has been 3 years in the making! "Magnesium Silicate Clouds in the Atmosphere of HD 209458b from a Rule-Based Tree-Structured Data Reduction" which is led by Katy Chubb & David Grant Cloud & data 🧵 time #astronomy🔭 #science🧪 1/n

why did they go with gen X instead of a letter earlier in the alphabet? did they not foresee the obvious problem

Look Costco if your return policy is basically “anything goes” then I don’t want to be judged when I return year-old vitamins (that are not expired!)

society: you should keep your eyes on the road when driving also society: HEY LOOK AT THESE GIANT BILLBOARDS

any time they publish one of those maps where a country has insufficient data I’m like why didn’t you collect enough data first before publishing you lazy bum

IAD added new JWST images along one of their halls, including our first WASP-39b spectrum!

That’s where the aliens are

My OCD demands that TESS observe the final missing block as soon as possible. 🧪🔭⭐

radio astronomy is crazy like what do you mean this field of poles and wires is a telescope

you know Noah’s Ark was written by people from the desert because 40 days of nonstop rain is just normal winter in the PNW

sometimes people forget just how small Belgium is

so when the USS Discovery spore jumps do people in the outer saucer gets pinned to the wall like one of those carnival rides

blue wave ❌ blue tsunami ❌ blue wall of water from that black hole planet in Interstellar ✅

squidward??

found out about Artemis II’s splashdown the best way possible: watching a livestream as part of a science fair project at our elementary school GO NASA GO ARTEMIS WOOOO

doing rm -rf / on a bloomberg terminal

they should have front brake lights on cars so I know if an oncoming car is going to stop or run the yellow light when I’m turning left

when you’re an academic and go to a zoom meeting that has to end after 40 minutes because of the time limit

can’t wait to find out if the moon is really haunted

This might be just me, but it’s a bit telling that the best words we apparently have for expressing our awe of the cosmos is still those of Carl Sagan from almost 50 years ago What does this say about our current society, culture, and outlook on science and space exploration?

🔭 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

Crystal clear ice on the shores of Lake Erie

I’ve driven dirt roads that are smoother than paved roads in toronto

>DC suburb has best cherry blossom display outside of downtown >no sidewalks

He was my thesis advisor too. His enthusiasm, energy, and never ending stream of ideas was infectious. He (along with Mark Allen) were huge influences on my life and career. I will miss him. Thank you for posting.

Yuk was new faculty when I was an undergraduate studying planetary. It always felt like he was unchanging and ageless. He made so many contributions while remaining positive and joyful. Truly will be missed.

My PhD advisor, Professor Yuk Yung, has passed away. The suddenness of this - I had only become aware of his illness a week ago - is shocking and it’s surreal that he’s gone. www.caltech.edu/about/news/c...

geologists:

OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING #JWSTCycle5

Useless fact of the day: the Chinese character 今 is shaped like Washington DC

let he without sin cos the first tan

Will have a thread soon about our new paper. I never thought I would do a HZ paper but it turns out the literature had missed some key points of the problem. LPL grad student Kayla Smith led our effort (and her first brown dwarf paper).

exploring the multiverse today (going through my conda environments until I find the right one)

I'm super excited to share a HUGE paper out from Young Worlds Lab team member Andy Boyle. I present for you, ~900,000 rotation periods from TESS! 🤯🔭🧪⭐ #exoplanets #stellarrotation arxiv.org/abs/2603.05586

If history is any indication, we are seeing the beginnings of a war of succession that will no doubt lead to a chaotic Warring States period

if you tell claude not to make mistakes then how would it learn

recently found out that an exoplanet colleague is related to one of the writers of the Stargate franchise and it’s taking a lot of energy not to pepper them with insane questions

oh ok

going to get some gas anyone has one of those “I did that” trump stickers

the quality difference between Lego and Mega Bloks is staggering I don’t know why they even bother

Two new JWST COMPASS papers on arXiv today! ✨ Transmission spectra of HD 15337c (led by @nicolewallack.bsky.social & @planetarygao.bsky.social) and TOI-260 b (led by myself & @planetarygao.bsky.social): arxiv.org/abs/2602.22327 arxiv.org/abs/2602.22329

The existence of Catherine Zeta-Jones implies the existence of Catherine Epsilon-Jones

we have failed them

Gravity

car stopped in the traffic circle with hazards on like yeah bro add to the chaos

misspelled radial velocities as radical velocities

spending a lot of time at home due to school closures and the kids getting sick and I’m beginning to lose all sense of time and reality do I have a job? Is there a world outside this house? are the people on my zoom calls real? if I don’t answer my emails do they go away? what is space? and so on

a Victorian child could have eventually eaten Doritos