Some lovely dust imagery indeed!

The amount of carbon in dust is surprisingly uncertain. This analysis supports a value of ~200 ppm (in line with what has been used by many dust modelers), significantly less than some studies that have suggested >400 ppm. Nevertheless, the quoted error bar is still 100ppm! arxiv.org/abs/2606.27530

Moby-Dick The God of Small Things Piranesi

I like to think of astronomy as the study of everything in the universe. True enough… but what are we missing? www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-... [I wrote this!] 🔭🧪

Some of my favorites not related to astrophysics: 1) Face processing (a whole quarter on how the brain processes faces) 2) Herman Melville 3) Mesopotamian history (that I parlayed into a trip to Egypt!) 4) Three quarters of art history, mostly 18th and 19th C European 5) Table tennis

NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky! This is the most comprehensive spectral view of the infrared sky, with 102 colors (or wavelengths) of infrared light from observations made between May and December 2025. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭

NASA has completed the construction of #NASARoman! Last month, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the observatory in Maryland. After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations in summer 2026: https://go.nasa.gov/48EqnE8 🔭 🧪

Our Public Talk this month is all about the mystery of Cosmic Dust From fragments of asteroids to cometary tails, the plumes of outer solar system moons and even debris from our own activities in space, the talk will have a bit of everything. ⏰ 6-7pm 📅 Tue 18 Nov 📍Burlington House, London 🎟️ FREE

New #Euclid image drop from @esa.int and @ec-euclid.bsky.social! 😍 Meet LDN 1641, a ‘dark cloud’ about 1300 light-years from Earth, observed by Euclid back in 2023 to test its guiding systems. ⬛️☁️

The first SPHEREx data products have hit the archive!

Let the science begin! 🥁 On May 1, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day. Read more here: spherex.caltech.edu/news/nasa-s-...

Some truly spectacular dust features in these spectra! Wondering if PAH absorption is starting to become important in that most reddened source. 🤔

We invite the future @prima-probe.bsky.social user community to a free, three-day hybrid working meeting hosted by IPAC on the Caltech campus. Spots are limited and registration and abstracts are due March 28. conference.ipac.caltech.edu/prima-pasade...

¡Excelentes noticias! El Telescopio de Gran Apertura del Observatorio Simons ya tuvo su primera luz. Con esto, la primera fase de SO, con tres SATs y un LAT, está completamente operativa. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/03/17/s...

🚨 BIG NEWS ALERT! 🚨 We’re just 24 HOURS AWAY from a MAJOR DESI release! 🌉🔭 Tomorrow at 3 PM PT, DESI is unveiling DR1, our first official Data Release—the largest dataset of its kind, packed with information on 18.7 million galaxies, quasars, and stars! But that’s not all…

It's paper day! 🔭 Very excited to share that my latest paper, and the first to come from my PhD, is on arXiv today: arxiv.org/abs/2502.21119

Paper (and press release) week! 🧪🔭 I'm so excited to share this awesome research result from @emmalieb.bsky.social and me, in a collaboration between @uofdenver.bsky.social and @noirlabastro.bsky.social. We made a JWST time lapse to watch the dust shells around WR140 expand!

It's on GitHub and is pip installable already, very very early alpha though so YMMV github.com/emilyhunt/SK...

#Astrochemistry webinar “From Stardust to Life: The Chemistry of Habitable Worlds” by Karin Öberg on January 22nd, www.acs.org/acs-webinars...

TIL that George Herbig of Herbig-Haro objects was from West Virginia! Home state astronomy pride. 🔭

Throughout my career I’ve collected a nice set of Strong Opinions about relatively unimportant things. Here’s one: Don’t end your talk with a slide that just says “Thanks!” or “Questions?” The slide that remains up during audience questions should be a summary of your main points

What has poked holes in the "Green Monster," the filamentary structure in front of Cassiopeia A? A new research article offers answers. aasnova.org/2024/12/02/n... 🔭🧪

🔭🧪 Things that make me happy: This is the first image from Mars, taken July 1965. Why does it look like this? Because computers were slow and it was going to be hours before the computer processed it enough to make an image. The scientists and engineers were impatient. 1/5

Astronomer: I need to correct for dust extinction. Me: Have you considered magnetic fields? But seriously, they can matter! 🔭

Hard to overstate how cool it was to see this image from PHANGS back in July/August 2022. There are now nearly 75 galaxies with similarly awesome observations in the sample (all public!). 🤩

Hard-hitting in-flight science trivia.

Ready for a week of dust in Sweden!

PAH features associated with attached H atoms have longer wavelength counterparts when deuterium is subbed for H. JWST just found one at 4.65um in what looks like a serendipitous detection in a molecular outflow spectrum. 1/2 arxiv.org/abs/2309.06486

Magnetic fields in a z=2.6 galaxy with ALMA polarimetry! arxiv.org/abs/2309.02034

"Ylem" is way too cool of a word for us not to be using it in modern cosmology.

An embarrassment of riches indeed! Gorgeous spectrum of the Orion Bar with prominent emission from hydrocarbon molecules as seen by JWST. Kudos to the PDRs4All team! 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2308.16733

Check out this new mid-infrared image of the Ring Nebula, taking with the MIRI instrument on the JWST! Stunning details visible in the surrounding shells. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson

All signs seem to point to PAHs being responsible for the 2175Å extinction bump. Yet, it's really hard to get right with detailed modeling, as this paper shows. I feel like there's something fundamental we're missing, but I don't know what. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04084