Hey, astronomers. Can you imagine astronomy research without ADS?!?!? No? So, have you filled out the ADS survey yet? Help archives help you! (Help archives keep funding!) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ow. #JWSTCycle5

The JWST Cycle 5 "Procrastination Monitor", i.e. Molly's proposal counter submission form, is up an running. Please fill it out if you have data to add to it. And do share! #JWSTCycle5 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Do you love WASP-107 b? Do you love making use of *both* ground VLT + space JWST obs to detect molecules in a "warm" (Teq<800K) #exoplanet in transmission, even in a crazy confusing cloudy atmosphere?! 🚨 It's PAPER* DAY! Which means #scicomm thread! 🧵⬇️🔭🪐🧪 *pre-print! arxiv.org/abs/2508.18964

NEW: Hundreds of NASA employees have filed a letter of formal dissent. "We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire."

Interpretation of #JWST exoplanet transmission spectroscopy hinges on having accurate error bars on the spectra. Correlated noise will come to bite you if you don’t model it appropriately. So this is great and important work, thanks @yoavrotman.bsky.social & al 👇🔭🧪

We need to understand the limits of our models and our data for reliable interpretations of exoplanetary spectra. First paper by my first PhD student! Happy advisor moment. Congrats @yoavrotman.bsky.social Check out his paper on the Arxiv and his thread below #exoplanets 🔭

Speaking of which, I'll be presenting this work later today at @exoclimes.bsky.social. Check out my talk at 5:00 if you're interested in learning more! #ExoclimesVII

Paper day! A 🧵 JWST transmission spectra are showing more and more signs of new exciting physics, which is awesome! But if our models don't take that into account, it can propagate as correlated noise and bias our inferences. What do we do? arxiv.org/abs/2503.21702 (1/n)

Astro folks, does anyone have any good tips for making conference talk slides? Looking for stuff beyond the usual "don't overclutter" and "spread the information over multiple slides" - any tips about how to make an aesthetically pleasing, easy to follow deck?

Need data to explain the disastrous proposed cuts to NASA? Here are seven charts that lay out why The White House’s FY2026 budget proposal poses a historic threat to NASA. www.planetary.org/articles/nas...

From Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social : This post summarizes the proposed major cuts to NASA and the NSF and the impacts they would have, and provides resources to help fight back against this wasteful and unnecessary attack on science. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/06/02/b...

Here is the updated version of the FY26 president's proposed #NASA astrophysics budget for current+future missions. The technical supplement document does have significantly reduced funds for NuSTAR, IXPE, TES (+HST, JWST, Roman), so I removed those Xs, but these are at/below bare minimum levels. 🔭

Have we as a society figured out definitively if there's supposed to be a space before the letter in an exoplanet name? "TRAPPIST-1 e" looks wrong but so does "WASP-96b"

Just shared a new paper on the arXiv, led my @luiswel.bsky.social and me, on the challenges associated with detecting gases in exoplanet atmospheres. As the field pushes towards new and exciting opportunities, we thought it was time to talk about what it really means to “detect” something!

A new, thorough reanalysis of the data that led to claims of biosignatures on K2-18b from @luiswel.bsky.social & friends - a nicely written lesson on why this stuff is hard. They find no significant evidence for DMS, the gas the Cambridge team claimed to have found. arxiv.org/abs/2504.21788

"Not strong evidence" - @spschmidt.bsky.social "Almost certainly not life" - @tessafisher.bsky.social In which I round up some Community Response on the exoplanet biosignature paper from last night 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The atomic spectral lines in this app come from the NIST atomic spectroscopy group, which has provided the world with spectroscopic measurements for 120 years. Today we got word that the federal government is laying off the entire group. 🔭🧪

new blog post! I talk about the potential risks to science posed by "vibes-based" LLM programming, and how we could mitigate them aditya-sengupta.github.io/vibescience/

Inbox of pain and agony #JWSTCycle4

קפה #1281 Coffee תראה @yoavrotman.bsky.social ! עשיתי לב לכבודך! אני מבטיח לשפר את כישורי ציור הלבבות שלי ב-25 השנים הבאות 😍

Paper editing is uh..... not going well

The Planetary Society strongly opposes the sudden, indiscriminate dismissal of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and explorers at NASA — the largest involuntary workforce reduction since the end of the Apollo program. Read more on our stance. ⬇️

Sign our letter to urge Congress, President Donald Trump, and key officials to reverse this arbitrary decision. These letters have proven effective, helping us to save countless space missions, now lets save jobs. It takes less than 30 seconds to sign. Please share! www.planetary.org/advocacy-act...

Gotta respect the one student who decided to turn in a homework answer for density in units of grams per cubic kiloparsec (...and yes, the answer was correct)

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

I think some people hear “grants” and think that without them, scientists and government workers just have less stuff to play with at work. But grants fund salaries for students, academics, researchers, and people who work in all areas of public service. “Pausing” grants means people don’t eat.

Every professor/academic on here needs to call their elected officials tomorrow re OBM federal funding pause. Be polite and professional and express your concern. I will be doing this.

I would guess that 75% of the graduate students in my department are funded entirely by federal grants. Virtually all of the postdoctoral researchers, too. If a funding pause were to come, it would be catastrophic for them (and there is no clear path to finding alternate employment quickly)

Call your Democratic Senators tomorrow and tell them to put down their work on nominations until OMB withdraws its power grab on appropriations. No more nomines go through. None.

Trump is attempting to unilaterally freeze trillions of dollars in federal spending that’s been duly appropriated by Congress. This is completely insane and illegal. He’s seizing unlawful control over the constitutional spending power? Five alarm fire www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Calling all undergrads! Just one week left to apply for Carnegie’s 2025 summer internship and work with us on all kinds of interdisciplinary projects in Earth & planetary science! Campus won’t look quite like this in June, but it’ll still be a magical experience ✨ carnegiescience.edu/about/workin...

Today I was told to take out a line about being a mentor to students from diverse backgrounds and historically underrepresented groups from my biosketch for a proposal, because it might damage our chances of getting federal funding. How has it come to this? I feel absolutely sick.

This is disgusting. It’s happening across government agencies, but there’s something viscerally horrible about seeing such hateful language underneath the NASA logo.

The price of eggs in the US is spiking, mostly due to #H5N1 bird flu. Solving the problem requires urgent, important communications from the CDC & FDA* and rapid development of research by the NIH** * Currently paused by Executive Order ** Grant reviews now all canceled www.kcur.org/news/2025-01...

“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.” scim.ag/40ureTO

use a burner email for this

NIH and other federal health agencies have been instructed to cease external communications indefinitely. This means that grant programs—the money that funds life-saving university and hospital research—are currently in limbo. This includes VA research on veterans’ health.

Oh no, what if this tip line received so many bogus reports from the general public that it became totally impossible to use???

Calling this DPI is a fucking joke.

I think this is one of my favourite colourful climate chart type things, because it depicts two things at once: - Things are going to get worse, no matter what - The degree to which they get worse depends on decisions made today theconversation.com/my-new-dark-... by @edhawkins.org

Please spread the word: Summer research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at the LLNL Space Science Institute: www.llnl.gov/join-our-tea... Open to non-US citizens. Deadline Feb 15.

Stop by Booth 405 at #AAS245 in National Harbor, Maryland, to learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the other missions that the Space Telescope Science Institute works on. 🔭 🧪

#לאקפה @yoavrotman.bsky.social

"Guys being dudes" isn't always about sports and beer and cars, sometimes it's about me and the homies spending 15 minutes discussing this free-body diagram of a slice of cheese in an academic paper

I fear that us jews haven't properly explored the whole "fry everything in oil" aspect of Hanukkah nearly as much as we should have, we really need to start getting funky with it

🚨 SPECIAL FIRST POST 🚨 Applications to @exoclimes.bsky.social (7-11 July, 2025 at @umontreal.ca) is now OPEN until Jan 24, 2025! Join us for a week of exciting talks on planetary atmospheres interspersed with ample opportunities to discuss and forge new collaborations! forms.gle/mpeZ3LXGoFb9...

Prompted by this and a need for distraction I Did Some Math. Turns out most extrasolar planets are quite cauliflower-compatible. A thread, with citations. And laboratory astrophysics. And footnotes.