This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew. Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right. Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

📢 Join us live in ~1.5 hours! 13:00 UTC = 15:00 CEST = 09:00 EDT = 06:00 PDT = 22:00 JST If you haven't signed up to our mailing list to access the Zoom-link, you can also watch it live on our YouTube channel 🔭☄️🧪 Livestream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlQw...

Ooo I quite like these plots, showing how well you detect things in an exoplanet (HAT-P-12b) spectrum with JWST (and HST) using combinations of instruments. Heinke+ arxiv.org/abs/2604.01219 🧪🔭 #exoplanets

Artemis II lifts off

Cool graphic

The Nordic country’s efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond its borders.

I got a chuckle out of it. Hope you do too. arxiv.org/abs/2603.29964

Don't judge a planet by its cover! 📖🪐 Join our next #RockyWorldsDiscussion online tomorrow on Thu 2 April at 13:00 UTC where Ana-Catalina Plesa from DLR will discuss how we can link models of rocky planet interiors to observations of their surfaces 🌋 More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail... 🧪🔭

This is an awesome explainer for the Arecibo transmission

Don't give them ideas... xkcd.com/3225/

🔭🪐 Open question for the exoplaneteers on here: what gripes do you have with current 1D atmospheric modelling and retrieval packages? Are there features you'd like to see, or ways we could make your life easier?

This is like the Titanic night sky

T-1️⃣0️⃣ days to launch! Got questions about the Smile mission? 🛰️ #askESA We will select some of your questions to answer live during the launch broadcast on 9 April, and address the others right here. 🔭 🧪 ☀️

The 2027 studentship programme at ING (La Palma) for four candidates. www.ing.iac.es/astronomy/sc...

Proud to announce that my first PhD paper has now been accepted and is live on arXiv!! arxiv.org/abs/2603.24662 In this paper I provide the first analyses of JWST spectra of a sample of young, co-eval L dwarfs, focusing on the silicate absorption and whether there are any equator-to-pole variations.

A cosmic first! 🚨 Hubble has spotted a comet that slowed and reversed its spin. Outgassing jets acted like thrusters, literally pushing it into a new rotation, shown here in this science visualization: https://news.stsci.edu/4c2u6hv

I met someone last week at the Exoplanet Atmospheres meeting who said that this little review I wrote was instrumental in them choosing their research area in grad school (!): arxiv.org/abs/2405.04587

The Dec 2028 timeline for an entirely new mission, using untried technology, seems completely implausible. It appears to be driven by the end of Trump's presidential term, not science or engineering. 🧪🔭🛰️ #planetsci The quotes in the NASA press release are eye opening. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

NASA's new leadership has plans: - A nuclear propulsion spacecraft (a technology that has never been implemented) delivering multiple helicopters to Mars in 2028. - A surface base on the Moon (no orbiting Gateway), and expanded commercial launches. 🧪🔭🛰️ #planetsci www.science.org/content/arti...

If you haven’t seen 3Blue1Brown videos yet, you are missing out! His latest one is on M.C. Escher’s picture frame distortion is absolutely breathtaking, using visuals to introduce complex analysis in what feels a very intuitive way. All his videos are excellent and well worth a browse.

Got around to updating the summary of all rocky planet temperature measurements so far. Definitely inconsistent with thick, Venus-like CO2 atmospheres!!! A bare rock model fits the data well … but thin atmospheres/ not too much CO2 are still possible. Adapted from Kreidberg & Stevenson 2025.

It's great to see WISPIT 2 CC1 promoted to WISPIT 2c - congratulations to the team! 🔭☄️ #exoplanets

More work has been published to try to understand the atmosphere of K2-18b! open.substack.com/pub/astrojak...

ONE WEEK LEFT TO APPLY FOR THIS (PAID!) FELLOWSHIP!

There's a giant hexagonal storm at the north pole of Saturn. It's 29,000 km across. So here's Earth for scale.

Star Formation xkcd.com/3222/

In addition to sharing that I was rejected by eight PhD programs >20 years ago, I will add that I would *never* get into any grad programs now based on today's impossible standards.

So I guess we at Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society support emojis now. ApJ would never! Please use this power carefully. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... 🔭

At AASTCS 11 Exoplanet Atmospheres, and Mike Line is telling it like it is

Hey #WomenInSTEM, please check out the qualifications and skills and DON'T WRITE YOURSELF OFF if you think you would be a good match. Throw your hat in the ring!

New contender for worst-ever acronym. ALBATOR (ecr-bAsed muLticharged ion Beam for Active debris removal and oTher remediatiOn stRategies)

Plato is getting ready for launch! 🧪🔭

Coverage in The Guardian for Harrison's Nature Astronomy paper on L 98-59d. This paper involved a number of other current and former members of the Oxford PCD group. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Yes 💯

I did a Meet the Scientist session at my son's nursery today. Absolutely terrifying, but so cool. We did EEG and talked about the model brain. Amazing deadpan replies from 4 year olds. The best reply to "Does anyone know what the brain does?" was "It stops your head from going flat". Not wrong, kid.

✨ Applications for the 2026 International Astronomical Youth Camp are now open! ✨🚀 Join us in Spain for the 60th lAYC celebration and experience an unforgettable total solar eclipse! 🌘 Head to our First Info page via the link in our bio to apply! Clear skies 🌌 🔭🎢 #EduSky #scicomm #astroedu

Oof, only an ~8% selection rate for JWST proposals (225 out of 2855 proposals!).

Paper accepted! Want to follow the science from humanity’s three asteroid sample return missions—but struggling because astrophysics 🔭 suddenly involves… rocks 🪨? I got you! This review is for non-geochemists 🧪 on our audacious missions to bring back a bit of the start of the Earth. Coming soon! 🛰️

Amazing set of preprints up today for everyone's favourite interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS! Three different teams use three different telescopes to measure 3I's composition in water, nitrogen & carbon. The isotope ratios suggest 3I comes from a truly ancient star 🧪🔭☄️

I'm super excited to share a HUGE paper out from Young Worlds Lab team member Andy Boyle. I present for you, ~900,000 rotation periods from TESS! 🤯🔭🧪⭐ #exoplanets #stellarrotation arxiv.org/abs/2603.05586

#PPOD: From orbit, parts of Mars look like sprawling spiderwebs etched across the hillsides. These patterns may record a time when groundwater flowed through large fractures in the rock, leaving minerals behind. 🧪 🔭

With the first Ariane 6 with four boosters, our fleet of rockets is complete 🚀 We will continue to work on upgrades to reduce costs, make our launch systems more robust and launch more often. For example, the powerful P160C rocket motor will replace P120C on both Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets.

🔭 Damn, sad to hear this — the PROBA-3 mission was a really exciting one for solar physics studies, basically consisting of two instruments making a coronagraph in space that was letting us study the Sun’s outer corona. Really hope it can be restored before it’s too late!

Join @stsci.edu as a software engineer, working on interactive data analysis and visualization tools for astronomers. 🔭 #astrocode Apps due March 18, 2026. recruiting2.ultipro.com/SPA1004AURA/...

📢 Less than 1 hour left until this talk begins! 14:00 UTC = 15:00 CET = 09:00 EST = 06:00 PST = 23:00 JST If you haven't signed up to our mailing list to access the Zoom-link, you can also watch it live on our YouTube channel 🔭☄️🧪 Livestream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=058C...

You've maybe heard of ocean planets 🌊🪐 but what about *electric magma* ocean planets?! 🔥⚡🌋 For our next #RockyWorldsDiscussion on Thu 5 March @ 14:00 UTC, Miki Nakajima will present exciting simulations on magma ocean dynamos in Earth and super-Earths More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail... 🧪🔭

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days). And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of? Small red stars. PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!! Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

Two new JWST COMPASS papers on arXiv today! ✨ Transmission spectra of HD 15337c (led by @nicolewallack.bsky.social & @planetarygao.bsky.social) and TOI-260 b (led by myself & @planetarygao.bsky.social): arxiv.org/abs/2602.22327 arxiv.org/abs/2602.22329

Our first glimpse of comet 3I/ATLAS from Juice's science camera 😍☄️ The precious data from the mission's November observations of the interstellar comet arrived on Earth last week. Teams are now digging in to discover what they reveal. Stay tuned for updates! More 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 🔭 🧪

"There is no public mandate for a single company in one country to make changes on that scale to the planet’s atmosphere." - Lawler, @astrokiwi.bsky.social & Revell (2026) "no group has the right to change the Earth's environment in any significant way w/o full int'l study & agreement" - IAU (1961)