A nice write-up of a new paper by Nate Kaib and myself by @starstryder.space. The punchline: the orbits of long-period comets appear to hold a signature of the flyby of the star HD 7977, which happened 2.5 million years ago! phys.org/news/2026-06...

Academic working in the humanities* or social sciences? Interested in history of ideas? Come join us at the marvellous Gresham College as the next Professor of Rhetoric (great title, no?) * except music.

So long #LHC and thank you for all the collisions 👋 Today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, comes to the end of an extraordinary chapter in its scientific journey. Find out more: home.cern/cern-bids-fa...

Study (N=8,097) finds women more likely to finish a PhD before 30 & have children after 35. Men tended to become parents during doctoral studies & often had 3+ children by 40. Early-career mothers had lower citation rates; fathers had no such penalties. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Lunar theft, violent encounters, all those space rocks breaking and entering. . .“The outer solar system is like a crime scene,” says @megschwamb.bsky.social. eos.org/articles/odd...

The Monterey Bay Aquarium PROUDly presents “Otter This World,” written and performed by Monét X Change with special guest Trinity the Tuck.

The President @jim-wild.bsky.social sums this up perfectly:

'A senior member of one of STFC’s advisory bodies told RPN that the..exercise represents “a major crisis for the UK"...all of the outcomes modelled are “shocking”....the government would be “committing an act of national self-harm by imposing these cuts”.' 🙏 @francesjones.bsky.social

Webb finds clues to the origins of Comet 3I/ATLAS ☄️ As interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS began moving away from the Sun in December 2025, astronomers turned Webb in its direction and captured detailed measurements of its chemical components.   🔭 🧪 1/3

This is the change, too: huge. bsky.app/profile/fitz...

Our research council trying to raise money by rebooting Yes Minister, In the Thick of It, and W1A. Stop blithering, and be honest with us. 🔭

Applications for this amazing postdoc opportunity close next week! #jobs #exoplanets

Happy solstice -longest day in the Northern Hemisphere today. Longest night in the Southern Hemisphere.

I need you to know that the shipping container into which the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was packed for transport to the launchpad is called the Chariot, and the barge pulling the container to Cape Kennedy is called the Pegasus. So yes, this is a picture of a Pegasus pulling a Roman Chariot.

This is * insane *. STFC council minutes from December have been removed from their website, changed, and reposted. The new version rolls back on funding commitments made explicit in the initial version. I can't think of another adjective other than Trumpian behaviour.

Doctors 25% more likely to miss a diagnosis on a patient within 3 months after Ai is implemented. The results indicate Ai has an immediate negative effect on professionals skillsets vs prolonged reliance. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Vera C. Rubin Observatory (@vrubinobs.bsky.social) days away from launching decade-long sky survey. After years of construction and months of testing, the Chilean mountaintop telescope is nearly ready to begin the most ambitious astronomical survey ever attempted." www.astronomy.com/science/vera...

"Astrophysics research is in trouble". Yup, we've brought in the big guns to #SaveUKAstronomy, particle and nuclear physics! Thank you @drbecky.bsky.social 🙏 📽️: www.youtube.com/shorts/omICc...

A full-on week, fighting to #SaveUKAstronomy & PPAN from 30% funding cuts. There were highs (👇hanging out with fab-folk) & lows (@ukri.org trying to erase history in old Council minutes) but the amazing support & ❤️ from the wonderful wide astro-community makes it all worth it. Onwards and upwards 💪🔭

Erini Lambrides, part of @sciam.bsky.social's inaugural class of Young American Scientists, went from seeking theater stardom to studying stars at NASA. Her unlikely journey into academia will change the way you think about science, failure and belonging: spklr.io/63321E3Um3 🧪

Don’t trust LLMs with your literature searches. Horrible gender biases as found in this paper (from later in the thread below) arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740 🧪🔭

Hello! We have a very-off-cycle postdoc fellowship at UC Santa Cruz. Open to any area of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Applications are due July 15th. It is funded by the Moore Foundation. Looking for someone to start Oct 1, 2026 (!, approx), see details below. aas.org/jobregister/...

The summer intern has started. The group is complete for the summer

Stars of physics are in Westminster right now to call on the Government to halt funding cuts to astronomy and particle physics research. Professor Brian Cox called them "inexplicable", urging the Government to instead "trust, inspire and continue to invest in the next generation of scientists".

📣 TESS IS A STATISTICS MISSION 📣

TAPPING THE SIGN

" #STFC ... have worked collaboratively with the sector as this process progresses across many community meetings ... involving many thousands of research colleagues. " Dear 1000's of research colleagues: do you feel "involved" in this "collaborative" process? 😡🙅‍♀️🔭⚛️ ℹ️: ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Taking a moment to take in the submissions in the Botanic Gardens before the Belfast Photo Festival.

Here’s our press release about Arrakihs! Lots of cool science will hopefully come out of it and I’m especially excited about what can be done with the long streams it will detect. 🔭☄️🧪 www.surrey.ac.uk/news/esa-off...

I really need to stop this last minute conference abstract writing. The 1 hour power nap and then a DPS abstract was fun. Now back to bed.

Impressive talk by Ishita Solanki, who did mission planning for Lucy. She will begin grad school at @ucf.bsky.social this fall. I didn’t know planning a tour of Jupiter’s Trojans involved so many cats ;) lucy.swri.edu

🧪

I got a talk at #ACM2026 - Now all I need is proper results....

An amazing opportunity to come and do astrophysics and/or space technology at the University of Auckland! Also the scope of the role is broad so if you like the idea of living in Aotearoa New Zealand, apply! jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversit...

The Administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a proposed rule that would politicize federal science grantmaking, replacing scientific rigor with ideological gatekeeping. AGU President Brandon Jones on why it's important to make your voices heard: spklr.io/6011E3zfZ

Went to the grocery store to by a few things. Very quiet in my part of South Belfast.

well @megschwamb.bsky.social just informed me the Vera Rubin Observatory should identify something like 33,000 Kuiper Belt objects over the next few years. Atsa lotta iceballs!

✨ Want to know more about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS? Then the new Europlanet-JUICE webinar is for you! Register now: bit.ly/3iatlas_juice

Come work at @aucklanduni.bsky.social on space (hardware, or astrophysics, or both) -- assistant prof (US) / lecturer (UK/AU/NZ) jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversit...

Still working on the half-baked research idea. Email off to two experts to get them thoughts on whether or not there is something interesting.

I've gone down a research rabbit hole today. From reading a paper that reminded me of something I could look at to making the plots and looking at the plots in the literature. I'm not sure if it will amount to anything, but it's been to fund to poke around with this idea all afternoon

Tonight at 10pm on BBC Four, The Sky at Night explores space weather and features Met Office’s Krista Hammond speaking with Sophia Herod. Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre is one of a small number of 24/7 global space-weather forecasting centres, which monitors and forecasts solar events.

The Planetary Society built an interactive side-by-side "track changes" comparison for the proposed OMB rules. They show exactly what the current rules say versus what the proposed rules would change, section by section, across all *399* affected provisions. dashboards.planetary.org/rules-change/ 🧪🔭

Something of a mea culpa, this one.

The Planetary Society created a fact sheet and action alert about the recent OMB proposal that would, among other things, insert politics into the proposal review process across science. More discussion here: www.planetary.org/articles/whe...

I talked to @skyandtelescope.bsky.social about the proposed OMB rules and the disaster it would be to science in the USA and for the world if they’re implemented. Read the article, and leave a public comment if you haven’t yet! 🔭🧪🎢

I led a paper on “Upper limits on exosatellites around Beta Pictoris b” where we searched for exomoons/satellites around the closest known directly imaged exoplanet. We combined CRIRES+ radial velocity and astrometry showing nothing >150 Earth mass in the Hill sphere #astrodon #exoplanets 🔭 /1

Please submit comments (good, bad, or indifferent) here if you are an AGU member: agu.quorum.us/campaign/163... Or here otherwise: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... Just let Congress and OMB know we’re are paying attention to the damage they’re doing to US science. eos.org/research-and...

I've been searching for the official NASA comms on this, but nothing. Lots of sites reporting in the last hour the ISS crew got orders "to enter their Crew Dragon spacecraft...& don their spacesuits in case the air leak warranted an emergency evacuation". 🤞hoping they can fix this🤞🔭🧪⚛️🛰️