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)

Coronal loops on the eastern limb--here is a Blue/White/Red color scaling of SDO AIA 171 Å showing intense plasma loops over the Sun's limb. The loops are boosting x-ray flux to above the C-class floor. The soures of these loops are active regions--we will see them soon. #heliophysics

This is so cool! You can see that at solar maximum (around 2002, 2013, and 2024 ish) HST drops more rapidly, because the increased solar activity puffs up the atmosphere, increasing drag on orbiting satellites 🧪🔭

A view we will not soon forget. The Blizzard of 2026.

Call for Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics The number of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by this nice graphic which shows the stats for new submissions for the last five years: It's very clear that the thicket is getting thicker!…

Hedgerow prominences along the solar rim yesterday! Taken with the Lunt 50mm Ha Solar telescope with 2x Televue Powermate. #astrophotography #solarphotography

#NASAWebb provided the first vertical view of Uranus's ionosphere, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2602

"Astrobiology and the Anthropocene: How Searching for Life Elsewhere Can Help Us Sustain Life on Earth". A talk I gave at the Vatican. Dropbox link to pdf of the paper www.pas.va/en/publicati... Pontifical Science Academy page with the talk video and paper text: 🧪 www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5d9go...

Lipids are kind of the ignored middle children of origins of life research. It's time they got a bit of attention, too! This week's post is a Q&A with geoscientist-turned-??? (interdisciplinary folks know the struggle) @jamessaenz.bsky.social about why there's no cutting the fat from origins. 🧪

Can't believe I never heard of this before: a laser that shoots at space debris to effectively poke them out of a collision course?! Using fancy adaptive optics for locking in on faint targets?!? This is a project for space safety, yes, but also a project engineered carefully to be MY FAVOURITE 🥺🔭🧪

Love that you can't always tell whether a wacky scheme mentioned in @xkcd.com is actually real or not. SNEWS is real! xkcd.com/3208/

Today we’re celebrating 52,600 orbits of Earth by the Sentinel‑3A satellite, together with @euspa.bsky.social and @eumetsat.int For ten years, it has been delivering data on oceans, land, ice and atmosphere. The constellation will grow with the launch of Sentinel‑3C in late 2026🚀

🧪🔭 The Terra Hunting Experiment is *so close* to first light — our instrument HARPS3 is looking sharp! If you wanna know more about our upcoming decade-long hunt for an exoplanet Earth, @sciencenews.bsky.social recently did this great article on what we’re up to: www.sciencenews.org/article/eart...

Mars - Cloud over Promethei Terra Full size 5k image and more info: flic.kr/p/2rWMYkb 🔭🧪 Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY @esa.int Mars Express 2025-05-24 ID: HR000_0000 (ND+RED+GR+BL)

Yep! Excluding a few dinosaurs and traditional institutions that persist over on Twitter, I get all my science news, leads, and chats with scientists through here now. The feeds also allow me to monitor all the topics I’m interested in so as soon as any new paper drops … it’s in my TL! 🔭🧪⚒️