CDT in Aerosol Science is welcoming applications for fully-funded PhD studentships as part of our 8th cohort to start in autumn 2026: www.aerosol-cdt.ac.uk/2026-projects/ Aerosol science is crucial to so many things, check out the linked project catalogue for studentships! #PhD #academicjobs

Impressive work, Richard!

Acquiring a white bowtie has been on my to-do list since the last viva I served as an internal examiner for! I'll be sure to get one by @nichollsh.bsky.social's viva in January.

Dr. Anjali Piette of the University of Birmingham gave a wonderful talk on connecting sub-Neptune atmospheres to their interiors as a part of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series. The video is now available on Youtube. #exoplanets #astronomy www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrT...

Really enjoying Dr. Shreyas Vissapragada's @carnegiescience.bsky.social seminar on three population-level surveys of atmospheric escape @oxoplanets.bsky.social!

Very exciting and well deserved @ntlewis.bsky.social, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you find!

I'm looking forward to the groundbreaking on Tuesday!

As a part of the launch of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series, Dr. Ryan MacDonald (@distantworlds.space) gave a great overview of our current understanding of rocky worlds thanks to JWST. The talk is now up on Youtube if you're interested. #exoplanets #astronomy www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN3y...

Great article from the Simons Foundation about the open source MESA stellar evolution code, which has a had a huge impact on astrophysics over the past 15 years. I had not heard that the code's architect, software guru Bill Paxton, had passed away in July. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/12/a...

Registration is open now for our fall workshop on Atmospheric Escape and Replenishment in Planetary Systems! 🔭 #exoplanets

Predictions of climate change are uncertain. That’s why we need to keep finding out how our atmosphere works, says Tim Palmer go.nature.com/414QrVV

Two postdoc jobs available on our Arctic Butterflies project! (Not actual butterflies - basically Arctic dynamics and predictability - the butterfly effect in the Arctic...) Oxford job: tinyurl.com/yc6h4b35 Reading job: tinyurl.com/ypn75jh2 Please help spread the word!

Job alert: we are looking for a postdoc to join the Atmospheric Dynamics group in Oxford to study Arctic atmospheric dynamics. The focus is on energy transfers between scales and implications for predictability. More details here: tinyurl.com/yc6h4b35

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.

My paper with Tom Evans-Soma and Nathan Mayne on magnetic drag models is now accepted and up on the arXiv. For a quick summary, look at the PDF of my Exoclimes poster that I shared last week. www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.08511

Do you want to work with me as a postdoc? The 51 Pegasi b fellowship is now open for applications heisingsimons.app.box.com/s/y8jg5tbsbd... This is one of the highest profile and most effective fellowships for early-career scientists studying exoplanets. (Read on for important news)...

See also my explainer thread below! bsky.app/profile/nich...

New paper on the molten Super-Earth L98-59d by @nichollsh.bsky.social in our group. arxiv.org/abs/2507.02656

everything is terrible except for this

I recommend giving this paper by @jiachenliu.bsky.social, @astroduncan.bsky.social, and Jun Yang a close read: arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891. Sub-Neptunes like K2-18b lie in an interesting regime where both the radiative feedback and mixing of chemical tracers is important, I’m looking forward to Part 2!

So very excited to see our collaboration with Nature Astronomy out today on #Juneteenth. These articles for #BlackSpaceWeek2025 were labors of love and I encourage folks to check them all out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My 15th Science Olympiad National tournament as part of the Astronomy event led by the fearless Donna Young — as usual, we’re hard at work proctoring and marking 60 exams, making it as fun as possible for the students (and ourselves!).

Here's my follow-up story on K2-18b, the distant planet where scientists claimed to see a possible sign of life last month. In three preprints, other researcher argue that the signal is noise. nyti.ms/4jaqQRv

Next, let's have wild camping become legal in every UK national park!

Interesting paper by Yang et al. on arxiv today arguing clouds might _help_ us observe O2/O3 on exoplanets in some cases: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07760

Exciting PhD opportunity at @exeter.ac.uk: Forecasting Martian Dust Storms (funded by @ukspaceagency.bsky.social)! Please share widely! More details: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Nice to see this research note on K2-18b from @astrojake.bsky.social, which demonstrates that a flat line (i.e. no spectral features) is a good fit to the MIRI data. #exoplanet 🪐 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2504.15916

“I’d like to propose a golden rule for press releases: A release should convey to its audience the same impression of a result that an independent expert would get from reading the paper which describes it itself.”

Hampton U (HBCU in VA) is looking to hire assistant/associate prof in atmospheric and planetary science! They are interested in exoplanetary science too! #BlackInphysics #BlackandSTEM #BlackInAstro #BlackInChem home.hamptonu.edu/hr/2025/02/1...

Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert from Oxford has an excellent thread below about the viability of DMS as a biosignature and plausible atmospheric structures for K2-18b. 🔭 #exoplanets 🧵

I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the University of St Andrews as a Lecturer in Extrasolar Planets in June 2025! 🌟 🪐 🔭 🌍 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 If you're interested in pursuing a PhD, postdoc, or fellowship in exoplanet atmospheres in beautiful Scotland (from Autumn 2025), please feel free to get in touch.

An astonishing headline reporting on new observations from a team led to Nikku Madhusudhan claims they’ve found ‘hints of life’ on a planet orbiting a dwarf star some 124 light years away. What’s going on? (1/n) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭 🧪

After a presentation of the Block award to Kimberly Paragas, we finished up our talks today with Daphne Broski-Laing presenting JWST phase curve observations of WD-BD binaries and Ted Johnson discussing studying planetary atmospheres with variable planetary infrared excess.

To kick off the last day of the meeting we have @johndebes.bsky.social and @sabrinapoulsen.bsky.social presenting results of JWST surveys searching white dwarfs for planets. There's a range of interesting targets that warrant follow-up!

Finishing off the day of talks before the conference banquet we have Ryan Challener showing 2D and 3D eclipse maps of WASP-43b and Jean-Baptiste Ruffio presenting the transformative capability of the JWST/NIRSpec IFU for characterizing directly imaged gas giant exoplanets.

Finishing off our morning session with Brianna Lacy showing model predictions for the viewing angle effects on late T and Y dwarfs and Michael Zhang showing the first JWST phase curve of a pulsar planet.

Continuing after the coffee break with Jerry Xuan telling us about volatile-to-refractory abundance ratios in the HR 8799 planets and Arthur Adams showing us JWST time-resolved observations of 2M 1207b!

Starting off Thursday with @astrorickman.bsky.social and Kielan Hoch telling us about space-based direct imaging of substellar objects -- Emily Rickman presented her recent Cycle 3 GO results, and Kielan is telling us about directly detecting silicate clouds in a multi-planet system.

Loving the public lecture by Prof. Zach Berta-Thompson (UC Boulder) @aspenphysics.bsky.social on The Glow of Distant Worlds. I’m especially enthralled by the IR camera, projector spectrum, and terrarium demos!

Finishing off our conference talks today with Kristin Sotzen and Reza Ashtari from @jhuapl.bsky.social telling us about applying PIE to JWST data and AI-based JWST data processing, respectively.

Continuing after the morning break with two talks on gas giants: Taylor Bell on a panchromatic JWST spectrum of WASP-80b and Lisa Dang on the enigmatic CoRoT-2b.

Kicking off Wednesday morning @aspenphysics.bsky.social with Drake Deming presenting lessons from Spitzer and Hubble thermal emission and Joost Wardenier presenting the recently observed WASP-76b phase curve.

We wrap up our talks today with two theorists, Maria Steinrueck and Isaac Malsky, presenting the impacts of photochemical hazes and the coupled impact of clouds and hazes, respectively for GJ 1214b. Their papers were recently posted to arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2503.22642, arxiv.org/abs/2503.22608.

We finish our morning session with some interesting new JWST datasets of Neptunes and sub-Neptunes: Pierre-Alexis Roy showing the thermal emission spectrum of a hot and high-density sub-Neptune, and Michael Radica showing highlights from the NIRISS NEAT GTO team.

After a snowy conference photo outside @aspenphysics.bsky.social, we continue with terrestrial planet atmospheric dynamics with talks by Christopher Wirth on day-night heat transport on hot rocky planets and Eric Wolf on GCMs of temperate terrestrial exoplanets.

Starting off Day 2 in the winter wonderland of @aspenphysics.bsky.social with Renyu Hu telling us about the thermal emission of 55 Cancri e and Brandon Park Coy describing population-level hypothesis testing with rocky planet emission data.

After an afternoon of skiing/tubing/co-working at Snowmass, we finished off Day 1 with Kimberly Paragas telling us about smashing rock samples and taking their spectra and Amélie Gressier showing the thermal emission from the NIRSpec phase curve of K2-141b. More rocky planets tomorrow for Day 2!

After the morning coffee break we continued the theme of searching for atmospheres on planets around M dwarfs with Ben Rackham telling us about stellar activity, Sebastian Zieba's results on LHS 3844b, Megan Weiner Mansfield on survey strategies for the DDT, and Pat Wachiraphan on LTT 1445Ab.

Nestor Espinoza and Hannah Diamond-Lowe kicked off the 2025 Aspen Center for Physics meeting on Atmospheric characterization of rocky to giant exoplanets in thermal emission with JWST with two excellent talks on the rocky worlds DDT and the hot rocks survey. Looking forward to a great meeting!

This was a fun day, and another excellent and far-reaching talk by @jaynebirkby.bsky.social!