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

what do you mean coronation street has more than 11,000 episodes and a character who has been there since episode 1 in 1960

JWST in the wild

footsteps in the snow preserved during the melt

can’t believe it’s finally my turn to do this but: COVER REVEAL!! here is the long-awaited cover for CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF STARSHIPS by the incredibly talented Kamille Rodriguez pre-order here: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cloudy-wit...

my 7 yo has successfully reprogrammed my brain to think 67 is funny

My new exoplanet figure, showing the relationship between planet radius and planet diameter, may be the most precise population-level trend yet discovered

A Defense of the Radius-Period Diagram (w/ the SS planets overlaid): It shows: - the huge range of separations and sizes - the very large number of discoveries - how many different detection methods have contributed (and where!) - how most of what we’ve found isn’t like the Solar System

We all show this figure, but I seriously agree with Peter that we need to rethink that. It tells a story but doesn't actually convey more than one or two important facts. It's almost ritualistic.

these spam emails are getting worse

Rather be a loser than a pedo

the irony with AI is that it could be an extremely powerful tool for the betterment of humanity but its main spokesmen are douchebag techbros

nice of her to confirm that all of the rich and powerful are depraved sociopaths who should be jettisoned to space

audience: what’s the current distribution of known exoplanets? me: uhhhh nobody knows

determined to give an exoplanets talk that doesn’t show the radius-period diagram

It’s hilarious how you can immediately tell a post is AI slop as soon as they drop the “that’s not X, it’s Y”

RELEASED TO ORG

I may have become too powerful

Research is a gas - it expands freely to fill any free time you might have had

Happy to announce I have a new paper out in Nature Chemistry Communications! The idea of this paper was pretty simple: what's the *minimum* set of chemical compounds that you need to 'boot-strap' terrestrial biochemistry into functionality? And where might that set have come from?

YES

THANK YOU WEATHER GODS

is it wrong of me to wish for a winter storm so severe that the XRP deadline gets pushed back

we used to travel in style (part 2)

passing nyc

CHOO CHOO

we used to travel in style