Just in from the @planetarysociety.bsky.social: The counter CR proposed by the Dems to keep the government open includes language protecting NASA missions in "operation, including extended operations, or under development or formulation." This is not in the CR proposed by House Rs. So we'll see.

Sometimes 2025 just feels like a lot, and you need an excuse to celebrate your fabulous team (and the whole exoplanet community!) reaching a new milestone… Happy 6,000 Confirmed Exoplanets Day, everybody!!!! (You may recognize the narrator of the video at the link! 🫣) www.nasa.gov/universe/exo...

Hamilton has spectacular drone videos of Icelandic eruptions so should be a compelling talk!

We have job opportunities in the APEx department at MPIA - please spread the word! Postdocs: aas.org/jobregister/... Tenure-track staff: aas.org/jobregister/... Max Planck Research Group Leaders: aas.org/jobregister/... + happy to host ERC, Humboldt, and other third-party funds.

This morning an idea came to me about how to work brown dwarfs into the upcoming wedding toast I will deliver at my daughter’s wedding. Hopefully I will come to my senses before the big day.

Never forget : September 13th , 1999. #Space1999

He is 💯 certain there is something to eat here. Must be seeing the LED.

Great to see this paper come out, a lot of work by many people went into the development of this model.

A picture of the @NASAmes Awards event - submitted by someone who was there. Note the shirt in the front row. #NASA

In the '70s, after Kuiper's passing, there was a schism within LPL that was an institutional crisis. Our archivist has collected the documents from that time and it is illuminating to read through them now, 50 years later. Explains a lot about the perspectives of some of our emeriti faculty.

This story began with a JPL press release in July 2024, soon after the #Mars rock was discovered. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-p... Today is the publication of the peer-reviewed paper describing what's in it. That @nature.com paper is here www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

Our (Faherty et al) newly published JWST detection of silane (SiH4) in the brown dwarf W1534 (aka "The Accident")! This molecule isn't seen on Jupiter because it's removed by deep silicate clouds, but unusual chemical properties of W1534 allow SiH4 to be mixed up into the visible atmosphere 🔭 🧪

The space advocacy efforts continue and science remains at risk! This week, the House CJS subcommittee are marking up their CJS bill, and it is critical that NASA funding is restored. Please consider contacting one of the subcommittee members: appropriations.house.gov/subcommittee...

For all of your exoplanet and brown dwarf cloud modeling needs! Virga is the descendant of the Ackerman & Marley cloud code and now features fractal aggregate clouds.

#TucsonProblems We got him out of the house after a little bit of excitement.

Need this cell to move west.

Can confirm @stellerarts.com that the Minute Clinic is the Covid jab workaround for Tucson.

Ooh ooh let’s rename NOAA the Department of Wharf

Update on the atmosphere vs no atmosphere debate for TRAPPIST-1 b and c -- here's a nice and (IMO) conclusive result from Gillon and Ducrot et al.: no thick atmosphere on either planet. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02128

Proper monsoon.

If our elected leaders truly believe we're in a new space race with China, then we cannot afford to abandon space science. Read the NEW OP-ED by me and Maxwell Zhu today in Payload Space: payloadspace.com/op-ed-space-...

Yoga stretches.

At a wedding-eve dinner where you make your own name tag. Not my best work but could use this one again.

A little Friday morning chaos for you. Come for the baby and stay for the biting.

Take a look and see if you've been pirated! 🔭🧪📚📖 Remember when corporate America flipped out over some pimply teens sharing files over Napster? Now it's our turn - except in this case, they've actually been blatantly profiting off our work, effectively reselling it

To what extent are the Keck RV planet searches still ongoing? Feels like I haven't heard of any discoveries in a while but maybe I'm not paying attention in the right places? I was on the NASA Keck TAC in late 90s and it felt like all we did was hand out RV time.

UArizona is eligible for the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship in Planetary Astronomy 🚀 Covering solar system & exoplanets. Apply to join us: heisingsimons.app.box.com/s/y8jg5tbsbd...

Enjoy this roadrunner pair at the watering hole. They even run off stage right.

The standard cartoon was pretty on point.

Now I know the walk in slide for my grad exoplanets class starting today. Just amazing.

Amazing!!!! A NEW gap-carving planet! So far, we haven't been able to image many. WISPIT 2b, like PDS 70 b&c is imaged at many wavelengths from 656nm (H⍺, blue here) to 3.7µm (👏MagAO-X @xwcl.science.web.brid.gy). VLT/SPHERE polarized scattered light at 1.6µm+reddish planet at 2.2µm in the gap, wow!

Asteroid Bennu – the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, led by LPL – is a mixture of materials from throughout, and beyond, our solar system. Over billions of years, its uniquely varied contents have been transformed by water and the space environment. news.arizona.edu/news/asteroi...

The application to join the LPL Planetary Sciences PhD program is now open! Visit lpl.arizona.edu/admissions for more information.

A quick advert for the ✨✨✨Official✨✨✨ release of the Virga cloud code (the python version of everyone's favorite EddySed model by @markmarley.bsky.social and Andy Ackerman). arxiv.org/abs/2508.15102

Morning scratches. I watched this through the window. Even though I’ve seen them plenty of times, I was still a bit surprised when the house-cat stood up and was so tall.

Its a good thing the Harvard astronomer today posted that he told the HiRISE team to look at the comet, they would never have thought of it otherwise.

I think that mass-loss is important for sub-Neptunes and the "radius valley," but I do not think that "core-powered" escape is significant. We find that "Boil-off," right when the disk dissipates, and then XUV driven escape, are major influences. ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJ....

Well, this isn't what I expected to see on the #cameratrap! I wonder if the #coyote found the local mountain lion's kill and ran off with part of it?

Well actually…

David Grinspoon confirms that his term appointment as NASA's Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy will not be renewed and the position itself is being eliminated. He'll participate in Wednesday's Astrobiology Update (which is listed on our Calendar).

A friend is visiting the Yale Peabody Museum. He realizes my wildlife trail cam is practically the same as their desert diorama.

I finished my one summer streaming commitment last night: Andor. After season 1 I was skeptical it was worth the effort but season 2 did deliver.

For the curious - a list of astronomical eponyms that I complied several years ago (with the help of several contributors). We always checked to see if they were used in the literature when the nominations were novel to us. staff.noirlab.edu/tod.lauer/ep...

Bureau of Land Management totally ignoring documented endangered species & Tribal concerns? YEP. Fantastic TV coverage of the plight of the area near my home. Thanks to @abc15.com for shedding a light. Female speaker is one of our board members. Pls RT. www.abc15.com/weather/impa...

An acrylic painting done in 1982 for an Earth history related 'Cosmic Calendar' that was supposed to be published by a Carl Sagan affiliated business, but the project fell apart leaving a dozen unused paintings. I have mine, including one that is yet unfinished. Here we see a Paleozoic tide pool.

We looked for an atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1d using JWST, but we didn't see any atmospheric absorption. So TRAPPIST-1d is quite different from Earth, despite lying just inside the habitable zone. The planet is either: ➡️ A bare rock. ➡️ Very cloudy. ➡️ Has a thin, Mars-like atmosphere. #Exoplanets 🔭

🚀 Join us Tue Aug 19 for #ExoPAG32 — NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group meeting! ✅ Free & virtual 🗳️ Vote on a community finding 🌌 Mission updates 👩‍🔬 Early career talks 🛰️ NASA program updates from the Astrophysics Division Director Register: go.nasa.gov/45r07LV

I was there as well and a memory is of the HiRISE PI at about T-2 min or so holding his head in his hands…. Perhaps considering all that could go wrong.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has selected CatSat as a finalist for the Rookie Satellite of the Year award! Voting closes on Tuesday, August 12 at 11:59 pm - cast your vote now: bit.ly/4ltscb7

I saw this on display once at the National Archives. From a time when members of the President’s own party held up the guardrails.