Herfstequinox

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 ☄

Some sad #exoplanets news in a paper led by me: “YSES 2b is a background star”#exoplanets A distant M dwarf star some 2 kiloparsecs behind the star just so happens to have a non-zero proper motion in EXACTLY the wrong direction: this required multiple GRAVITY observations to solve… #astrosci #astrodon

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/

These maps are utterly amazing, the author wrote up detailed descriptions and design choices in the GitHub repos - really detailed and brilliant work! #astrosci

Right, now I wonder where WISPIT 2 is in this box....?

Two papers announcing the discovery of a directly imaged 6 Jupiter mass planet around binary system HD 143811 AB Squicciarini+ and Jones+ in Sco-Cen - Keck, Gemini and VLT all imaging this companion and confirmed with several years of common proper motion. #astrodon #exoplanet #exosci

I can

Rings are everywhere! A new ring around Quaoar. Very cool.

We had WISPIT 2 yesterday, and today we have van Capelleveen et al. with “WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): Two directly imaged exoplanets around the Sun-like stellar binary WISPIT 1” with 10 and 4 Jupiter mass planets at 338 and 840 au respectively #astrodon #exoplanet #exosci

Cite. Women. Looking at yet another case where there are 7 papers that should be cited, 6 led by men. Only one not listed is the one led by a female ECR (even though it is more up to date than one of the male-led papers).

New protoplanet(s?) alert! I'm happy to share this LBTI image of WISPIT 2 from our team's paper led by Laird Close. Planet b was discovered at Hα with MagAO-X following the SPHERE disk discovery (R. van Capelleveen +), and CC1 might be a candidate 2nd (enshrouded?) protoplanet #exoplanets ☄️🔭🧪

Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b#LeidenObservatory a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet clearing a path in a circumstellar disk. Laird Close and his team saw it in H-alpha, indicating gas accretion #astrodon 🔭 🧪

Resorting to somewhat extreme methods to focus my easily distracted self in the last week of #astronomy grant writing #AcademicChatter

HOW IS IT ALREADY THE AFTERNOON?

Excellent lunch talk by Lisa Kaltenegger (Director @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social) #exoplanets @leidenscience.bsky.social

When I was a graduate student at the Institute of Astronomy, there was a giant set of filing cabinets where all the alternative theories that were sent in my mail would be stored away. There were a LOT of them.

This is absolutely glorious. Chapeau!

“If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, Quaint little villages, here and there…” #SouthCoast #BluebirdCafe #GrooveArmada “At the river” by Groove Armada

If you are rowing in the Netherlands, you get used to sharing the waterways with the occasional BFB. Weirdly enough their wakes are not a problem if you’re sculling, but smaller cruisers can cast waves big enough to flood your footwell. I’m lucky I can get to enjoy the waterways here.

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610 We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

please ... please ... pretty please ... can people posting to arxiv please state which journal, if any, they planning to submit to, are submitting, have submitted, ... ☄️

Our VLT may have made intriguing discoveries in the surroundings of young stars: ➡️ A planet candidate inside a disc spiral (image 1) ➡️ A planet or brown dwarf candidate forming through gravitational instability (image 2) https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2513/ 🔭 🧪

An absolutely phenomenal result from this team! Using brand new LSSTCam data to precover 3I/ATLAS. Astonishing stuff, and a sign of excellent things to come from @vrubinobs.bsky.social

Oh this is AMAZING. Just what I needed.

Once again, don’t trust the output of any #AI assistant without verification. This is not the HR 8799 exoplanet system, it’s the YSES 1 exoplanet system. Source: my (then) grad student Alex Bohn took this image using VLT/SPHERE#AI #astrodon #astronomy #exoplanets

I stumbled upon a terrifying plot legend in Wen (2025) “Updated Earth Tomography Using Atmospheric Neutrinos at IceCube”: “Vacuum earth is 5.16 sigma away” - but in which direction? Should we be nervous? Relieved? How far away is a sigma, exactly? So many questions!

Seeing a sudden trend for interstellar objects to generate papers based on other teams' DDT proposals within just a few days of data acquisition. This is unfair. 1) It disadvantages ECRs, who are often the ones getting to work on a new exciting dataset 2) it sideswipes anyone less then fully abled

My graduation gift to my PhD students is a slide rule - hey, at least it's a personal computer!

Funerals should just be car boot sales of all your stuff with a jacket potato and real ale stall, and everyone can wander round your stuff reminiscing about how weird you were, and wondering why you’ve so many sea-salt dispensers. The family can keep the money or donate it to charity.

XKCD is hitting uncomfortably close to my group’s #exoplanet research! #astrodon

Dr. Kielan Hoch has a #Nature paper on #JWST observations of the star YSES 1 with its two gas giant planets#Nature#JWSTShe and her team have discovered a circumplanetary disk around the larger 1b and silicate clouds in 1c. Wonderful results and more to come - watch this space! #exoplanet #astrodon

Beautiful new results from my @stsci.edu colleagues Kielan Hoch and collaborators (on here: @mattkenworthy.bsky.social, @offallingstars.bsky.social , @bmacastro.bsky.social , @balmer.bsky.social) with JWST + MIRI www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Wow! Bryant+ with “A giant planet transiting a 0.2 solar mass host star” that has a transit depth of almost 20% - with that depth, this will be ideal for a very detailed spectroscopic study in the future. A very interesting outlier. #astrodon #exoplanets

Hey, the paper is online! 🎉🪐🔭 #exoplanet Check out the shiny new NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoFOP paper, which covers all the updates to our data and services since Akeson+2013. Please update your .bib files and cite accordingly!! arxiv.org/abs/2506.03299

Together with Sebastiaan Haffert our review on “High-Contrast Coronagraphy” is out - writing an ARA&A review has been on my academic bucket list, and I’m very proud of the result. It uses the showyourwork! framework, making it a completely reproducible paper. #FAIR #astrodon #exoplanets

This is absolutely perfect. No notes.

An interesting #galactic paper by Cameren Swiggum (@mac0598.bsky.social) et al. came out today! ☄️🧪 Extending previous work that showed most young star clusters near to the Sun came from just three regions, Cameren shows that actually *all* nearby clusters come from just three regions!

Mallaghan: dusty object in Orion has a phase curve observations, it’s highly reflective, has a deep transit and seems to be variable. Light curve is very asymmetric, unclear at the moment as to why. Could it be a tilted disc system? #ukexom25

Last talk of this block is by Niamh Mallaghan about searching for giant exorings around a dusty object in Orion. Another example is ASASSN-21js, a candidate, transit is taking several years and won’t come around again for 100,000 years. #ukexom25

Final message from Gaia. The detectors were shutdown in a special order

🥳 It's paper day for the completed #ESO Kilo-Degree Survey. We end our journey with a consistent picture of #cosmology 😲 I've been co-leading KiDS for 12yrs & I'm so proud of what the team's achieved. If you're at the #Euclid meet, go to Angus Wright's talk @10am today!🔭 ℹ️: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19441

Super proud of my PhD student Osmar who discovered that the so-called 'compact disks' around young stars are REALLY REALLY small! Look at the full sample of Lupus disks, observed at 30 mas resolution with ALMA.

I’m in Belfast this week, giving an Astrophysics Research Centre Seminar at #QUB on Wednesday 26th March titled “Scattered: Wide separation directly imaged exoplanets and shattered exomoons” (also soliciting pub recommendations!) #astrodon #exoplanets 🔭🪐 🌗🎆

20 March 09:01 GMT 🔭

I keep forgetting when and where telescope observing cycles/periods are, so I spent a part of this morning making this spreadsheet which you can view. I will attempt to keep it updated (and yes, P116 is 7 months, not six!) #astrodon #exoplanets 🔭🪐

I highly, highly recommend commissioning Mark for your space art. It's beautiful and thoughtful work from a world expert (and he trained as a professional astronomer too).

I spent almost 2 hours painstakingly copying the orbits of all 128 Saturnian moons from the announcement MPEC and reformatting them for visualization... Behold, here are the orbits of ALL 128 MOONS OF SATURN. This isn't just a moon system—it's a literal asteroid belt around Saturn! 🧪🔭☄️

I just released the Museum of All Things version 1.0!!! You can find it at mayeclair.itch.io/museum-of-al...

Universities: Death by Bullshit Just time for a quick post to pass on an Editorial by Masud Husain with the title On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities which appeared in BRAIN magazine (which I buy for the Spot-the-Cell competition). I agree…