Harrison Nicholls and colleagues suggest that exoplanet L 98-59 d could be entirely composed of molten lava: a magma ocean covering a mushy core. http://dlvr.it/TRWtfm ☄️@nichollsh.bsky.social

The menagerie of planets continues to amaze. Now some scientists think they have identified a world with a permanent magma ocean and a molten core. Amazing! 🧪 #planetaryscience www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Had a great time at #RockyWorlds4 this week - presenting my PhD work on magnetic field generation in planetesimals 🧲 and learning lots about magma oceans 🔥ready for my post doc project. Thanks to everyone for such great discussions and @rockyworlds.bsky.social for organising a fantastic meeting!

Poster discussions at #RockyWorlds4 has been amazing! Coffee breaks are on 🔥🔥🔥Super creative posters with incredible science, I think we are improving as a community to communicate our research to other colleagues 🧐 Looking forward for the poster competition ✨ @rockyworlds.bsky.social

My 25th (!) newsletter post shares my main takeaway from the #RockyWorlds4 conference: Hot rocks are what's cool in rocky exoplanet research right now. Lava planets, especially look like they're about to teach us a *ton* about how rocky planets work. So come on in, the lava's fine! 🧪🔭

Looks like Planet Earth is a fan of #RockyWorlds4 as it gifted us with a gorgeous conference souvenir last night! 🤩🔭🧪

Another cool result shared at #RockyWorlds4: Nearly all sub-Neptunes, if they are gas dwarfs (as opposed to water worlds), should have magma oceans beneath their hydrogen atmospheres. That includes the notorious K2-18b — if it is indeed a gas dwarf and not an ocean planet. Preprint:

You're welcome! 🔭😊 The LOC of #RockyWorlds4 (groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/organisers/loc) is doing everything they can to make the conference an unforgettable experience. 😁

✨Auroras✨ over Groningen,NL during the first after-conference day of @rockyworlds.bsky.social This planet is just so incredible! Looking forward for the talks, sessions and activities the rest of the week🌌

@johannateske.bsky.social's #RockyWorlds4 talk on TOI-561 b just reinforces my feeling that this weird little planet is one to keep an eye on. It's among a handful of hot rocks challenging what we think we know about which planets have air. I wrote about this last year for @sciam.bsky.social:

At #RockyWorlds4 in Groningen, scientists explore rocky planets with radically different chemistries and atmospheres. With the LIFE mission, they aim to study exoplanets directly and look for unexpected signs of life — not aliens, but subtle atmospheric clues. Read more: www.rug.nl/fse/news/mat...

Congratulations, @nichollsh.bsky.social! Your thesis was a joy to read, and it was great to get to know you over the past 1.5 years. I look forward to seeing the research that you and Oli get up to at Cambridge. Perhaps almost as impressive was your AOPP champagne cork shot! Video below.

Congratulations @nichollsh.bsky.social for your outstanding work and thesis results! 🔭🚀🌋 It has been and continues to be privilege to work with you, and all the very best for your new endeavour at Cambridge! 🌟💻

I'm excited to spend the week hearing and talking about rocky worlds! This is one of my favorite meeting series, I leave energized and with new ideas. 😁 You can follow along with the talks on YouTube if you aren't joining us in person or on Zoom: www.youtube.com/@rockyworlds...

P.S. Follow along on Bluesky with #RockyWorlds4 (h/t @nplinnspace.bsky.social 🙌🏻)

Wondering why we've been so quiet this month? That's because we're busy preparing to welcome everyone *next week* to Groningen 🇳🇱 for... 🌋✨🚀 The ROCKY WORLDS 4 Conference 2026! 🪐✨☄️ Updates will be posted throughout the week from this account & others using the #RockyWorlds4 hashtag – stay tuned! 🔭🧪

Hi all! If you are looking for a conference in exoplanet interiors in 2026, check out "Layers of Understanding: Model Intercomparisons of Exoplanet Interiors": layersofunderstanding2026.github.io It will take place in MPIA's campus in April 13-17th. The registration deadline is 15 January 2026

Are you a grad student interested in writing for Astrobites, or do you know one? We're recruiting! Apply by November 26 :) astrobites.org/2025/10/31/a...

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Together with Kristina Kislyakova, Louis Müller, Anuja Raorane, and @exocytherean.bsky.social we are organising the session "Early Solar system: crucial timings for habitability" at @egu.eu 2026. Please consider submitting an abstract if you work on these issues. :)

@kapteynastro.bsky.social of @rug.nl invites applications for in total 7 PhD and 4 ERC-funded postdoc positions in our annual call. ⭐🔭 PhD positions: aas.org/jobregister/... Postdoctoral positions: aas.org/jobregister/... #exoplanet #astronomy #geoscience 🧪🔭⭐ [Image credit: Mark A. Garlick.]

w/ Oli Shorttle, @johannateske.bsky.social & Eliza Kempton we reviewed our current understanding and prospects for peaking on the inside of small #exoplanets in "Constraining exoplanet interiors using observations of their atmospheres": www.science.org/stoken/autho... & arxiv.org/abs/2510.08844 🔭🧪⚒️☄️

How can we tell what's inside an #exoplanet? @timlichtenberg.bsky.social et al review how a planet's atmosphere interacts with its interior. Atmospheric observations can distinguish between lava worlds, water worlds, temperate surfaces or supercritical interiors. ☄️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The goal of this workshop is to define and implement a roadmap for a detailed intercomparison project between multiple leading computational frameworks of magma ocean evolution. bit.ly/3IZbJyn @timlichtenberg.bsky.social @lavainspace.bsky.social @astroyami.bsky.social @meteodenny.bsky.social

📢 Don't forget to join us for this talk tomorrow (Thursday)! 13:00 UTC = 15:00 CEST = 09:00 EDT = 06:00 PDT = 22:00 JST If you haven't signed up to our mailing list to access the Zoom-link, you can also watch it live on our YouTube channel 🔭☄️🧪 #exoplanet livestream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMr2...

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

A very nice article by @elisecutts.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social, highlighting the surprise of the discovery and the potential implications for our larger understanding of how atmospheres form and decay.

This is such a cool result! TOI-561 b is basically the worst possible place to go looking for an atmosphere: too hot, too small, and too old. But it looks like someone forgot to tell the planet that. Because it has air, anyways 🧪🔭 Me for @sciam.bsky.social:

Very exciting paper on arXiv today: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17231. The best evidence yet for a secondary atmosphere on an ultra-hot super-Earth. 🔭🌋 Very surprising given the theoretical predictions of rapid atmospheric escape ("cosmic shoreline") on these planets; [...]

Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history, and its lessons are a massive human achievement. “How We Came To Know Earth,” our new series, is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. www.quantamagazine.org/series/clima...

Hi! Today @quantamagazine.bsky.social published a special issue on climate science, featuring stories about how Earth's climate fundamentally works that I needed to read after covering climate impacts for so many years. I hope you'll check it out! <3 www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-...

Two days left to submit abstract to Rocky Words 4 Groningen in January 2026: groningen2026.rockyworlds.org @rockyworlds.bsky.social #exoplanets #astronomy #geoscience #planetaryscience

Exoplanets 🔭 and Planetary Science 🪐 : Two Different Worlds 🌍 ? What can planetary scientists learn from exoplanet research? Read all about it in our interview with @timlichtenberg.bsky.social www.europlanet.org/exoplanets-a... @europlanetmedia.bsky.social

📣 +++ ANNOUNCEMENT! +++ They are the winners of the Europlanet Career Medals! 🥇 Early-Career Medal Winner, @timlichtenberg.bsky.social 🥇 Mid-Career Medal Winner, Benoit Carry 🥇 Lifetime Achievement Winner, Jean Schnieder 👉 Discover more: www.europlanet.org/tim-lichtenb...

#RockyWorldsDiscussion is back from our summer break! 🔭🧪 Our next speaker is Laura Schaefer from Stanford University, who will tell us about redox gradients in planet formation simulations of terrestrial planets 🌍🌕🪨 Join us on Zoom on Thu 4 Sep @ 16:00 UTC More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail...

This Brit nails it. #Immigration

@marattia.bsky.social, postdoc in our group, won the Edith Alice Müller Award 2025 of the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy for their outstanding PhD thesis in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Great achievement @marattia.bsky.social, congratulations! 🥳🎉 @kapteynastro.bsky.social

In our now-published paper we model the early history of three exoplanets to specifically study the role of tidal heating on their capacity to solidify. A physically robust feedback mechanism can keep them molten, even with relatively thin atmospheres, which may extend to lots of rocky exoplanets.

Published in #MNRAS: "Self-limited tidal heating and prolonged magma oceans in the L 98-59 system", Nicholls et al. This is Fig. 1: for the caption & to read the paper please visit academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... @oxfordacademic.bsky.social @royalastrosoc.bsky.social

Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world, @billmckibben.bsky.social‬ writes.

We performed an analysis of the 2024 NWO VIDI awardees. Conceived to support researchers transitioning from postdoc positions into independent scientific leadership, the VIDI has become more of a mid-career consolidation grant. Read our full analysis and recommendations: ap-net.nl/wp-content/u...

Iris' paper is now published in ApJ at doi.org/10.3847/1538...! @nichollsh.bsky.social

Hola Astro/Geo/Photo/Documentary- BlueSky community! This is my first post soooo: I’m Mariana, I’m a 2nd year PhD Student researching the geophysical evolution of Magma Ocean Exoplanets! I’m in love with volcanoes of this and other planets 🌋👑🌍

In our new paper we model the complete evolution of L 98-59 d from 'birth' up to the present day. We show that it cannot be a gas dwarf or a water world; it's a 'hybrid' planet with an H2-rich atmosphere containing H2S and SO2 (photochemistry!), and a deep magma ocean. @timlichtenberg.bsky.social

📣 Calling all rocky enthusiasts! We are thrilled to announce that the ROCKY WORLDS 4 Conference will take place 19-23 Jan 2026 in Groningen, NL 🇳🇱 This is the 4th Meeting in our series & we can't wait to see you there! Abstract submission is NOW OPEN groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/groningen-2026 🪐☄️🔭

One more week left to apply for the below advertised interdisciplinary PhD position within the context of the Dutch PRELIFE consortium! ⏩🏃‍♀️

The abstract submission for Rocky Worlds 4 is now open! groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/registration... 🌋🔭🧬😱

Just published in JOSS: 'AGNI: A radiative-convective model for lava planet atmospheres' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07726

Pretty much sums up it up for me.