It's happening!!! Pandora is going to space in just over 16 hours (if all goes well). Pandora is going to help us study exoplanet atmospheres, even when their host stars are misbehaving. I am headed up to Vandenberg to watch the launch shortly, and will make a thread about the mission/launch here!

Ever wondered how many bins to choose when making a histogram of data? The answer is that you shouldn't choose a number of bins yourself! ☄️ #astrocode Here's a little notebook explaining how to make less biased histograms:

I'm very happy I woke up at 4am this morning to catch 3I/ATLAS right before its closest approach to Earth (today!) This interstellar visitor is traveling over 60 km/s ☄️ At 269 million km (1.8 AU), I took a series of 2.5 min exposures with my Seestar 🔭

The application for the ESO Summer Research Programme 2026 has just opened! It‘s a six week programme in Garching close to Munich where pre-Ph.D students can work on a hands-on project. Working at @eso.org is a fabulous experience, so please help me spread the word ✨ 🔗 eso.org/sci/meetings...

the day is finally here: you can order my debut non-fiction, CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF STARSHIPS: HOW THE DRAKE EQUATION REVEALS THE ODDS OF LIFE IN THE COSMOS from B&N!! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cloudy-wit...

⭐️✨🔭Please help us get the message out about the 7th annual international ASPIRE program at @api.uva.nl. This summer 2026 school provides astronomy research experience for talented MSc students from countries where opportunities to move into a PhD program are limited. Applications are due 17 Dec! ⭐️✨🔭

Equating giant planet occurrence rate of ~20% to the disk fraction, that means a timescale of ~10 Myr for giant planet formation!

New paper led by Fabian Polnitzcky & with @sratzenboeck.bsky.social + @joaoalves.bsky.social: based on the ages of stars with infrared excess in Sco-Cen, it seems planet-forming disks last around twice as long as previous estimates suggest - giving twice as long for planets to form. 🔭☄️ #exoplanets

Question for the #exoplanets crowd: Does any one know where to find an updated version of this plot? I'm looking for the "standard" exoplanet mass vs. semi-major axis plot, but with an overlay of which planets have a spectroscopic measurement of their atmosphere wasp-planets.net/2020/09/29/w...

Enjoyed giving a UofA Origins talk on how protoplanetary disks evolve – featuring new results from ALMA and JWST. The recording is available here 👇 youtu.be/mdgGgnjVbb0 @uarizonalpl.bsky.social @stewardobservatory.bsky.social

Big congrats to Jennifer Burt, Xavier Dumusque, and Sam Halverson on finishing their epic (instant classic) Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics article "Precise Radial Velocities"! arxiv.org/abs/2511.01954 contains some great new graphics for talks on #exoplanets #EPRV #DopplerSpectroscopy

The NASA #Exoplanet Archive now has Gaia DR3 IDs! This should hopefully make your work and planning observations easier! exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu

w/ Oli Shorttle, @johannateske.bsky.social & Eliza Kempton we reviewed our current understanding and prospects for peaking on the inside of small #exoplanets in "Constraining exoplanet interiors using observations of their atmospheres": www.science.org/stoken/autho... & arxiv.org/abs/2510.08844 🔭🧪⚒️☄️

How do giant planets influence the type of #exoplanets that form in the habitable zone? A thread 1/🧵

Our paper on the JWST/MIRI observations of the epsilon Eridani system, led by Dr. Schuyler Wolff, were published today! This is the last of the Archetypical Disks in our MIRI Survey, after Fomalhaut and Vega. Just like for those disks, our MIRI images reveal an extended inner asteroid disk!

I'm really excited about this one! It's fantastic working with Dr. Yayaati Chachan: arxiv.org/abs/2509.20428 "Revising the Giant Planet Mass-Metallicity Relation: Deciphering the Formation Sequence of Giant Planets" Lots of great nuggets her, including that even super-Jupiters are very metal-rich.

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...

Paper day! You're doing ground-based high-resolution exoplanet transmission spectroscopy and want to analyse the planet—not the star or Earth's atmosphere. Is there a way to disentangle your spectrum *without* destroying the planet signal? arxiv.org/abs/2509.12737 🧵⬇️ 🔭 #exoplanets #astromethods

For the last two years, I've been paying for the Astronomy feeds hosting myself. It has been a privilege to grow our community here, but I also shouldn't keep doing it for free 😅 That's why I'm delighted to announce that we now have a donations page on Open Collective! 🔭☄️ #astrophotography

Seems like Ayumu Shoshi et al. did take a high-resolution ALMA image of the disk around IRAS 04125+2902. arxiv.org/abs/2509.01896 This system also has the youngest transiting #exoplanet, discovered in November 2024 with TESS. Disk, planet orbit and outer stellar companion orbit are all misaligned.

Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b#LeidenObservatory a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet clearing a path in a circumstellar disk. Laird Close and his team saw it in H-alpha, indicating gas accretion #astrodon 🔭 🧪

New protoplanet(s?) alert! I'm happy to share this LBTI image of WISPIT 2 from our team's paper led by Laird Close. Planet b was discovered at Hα with MagAO-X following the SPHERE disk discovery (R. van Capelleveen +), and CC1 might be a candidate 2nd (enshrouded?) protoplanet #exoplanets ☄️🔭🧪

#achievement for the day (please don't send me any more email)

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....

Question for the radial velocity #exoplanets experts: Is there an animation that shows two spectra being shifted with respect to each other and the corresponding values of the cross correlation function changing? I think I’ve seen one in a talk but can’t find a nice animation online

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 🔭

Kepler mission: smaller stars have more short-period, small #exoplanets. Theory: the smallest stars won’t have enough disk material to make small planets so there must be a turnover. Kepler+K2: We have found a turnover! Check out our newest Scaling K2 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05734 🧵 1/9 🔭🧪☄️

I have a complaint about Avi Loeb's latest work and I want to speak to management. medium.com/@steve.desch...

Images from Palomar at 2 different infrared wavelengths last night - one that Saturn's methane atmosphere absorbs, and one the it reflects! (The faint point source is the moon, Tethys!) Taken by David Ciardi, Catherine Clark, @lowbacca.bsky.social and Miranda Felsmann; animated by me (and ezgif!)

I really like this graphical summary of the architectures of planetary systems from @sidereuskinch.bsky.social‬'s talk at From Transits to Trends!

New paper! Allow me to introduce TARS = Torqued Accelerator using Radiation from the Sun. TARS (yes inspired by Interstellar!) is a rotating light sail that's capable of launching chip sats into interstellar space using only radiation from the Sun, so let's dive into how it works.

The main takeaway of my talk, in the style of the ‘Behold my field of fucks and see that it is barren’ embroidery:

What does the radius valley tell about the planet formation scenario around low mass stars? And how does it connect it with water worlds? To know more, come visit my poster #37 at SSW2025. #sagan2025 #exoplanets

Want to learn about the relationship between planet size and orbital eccentricity? Read this thread! 🧪 🔭 🪐

Earn Your PhD at Earth's Premier Astronomy Hub! 🔭 ✅ Study under world-renown scientists ✅ Access legendary telescopes ✅ Join a global research network 🔗 Apply now: astro.uc.cl/en/doctorado... 📅 Application period: From July 1st to August 1st, 2025 for March 2026 intake.

Interested in doing a Masters or PhD in one of the leading astronomical institutes in Latin America? Apply now to these fully funded positions! aas.org/jobregister/... 🔭🧪☄️ #exoplanets

Why does the solar system not have super-Earths? A thread #exoplanets ☄️

More on DR4: it's expected to include "a few thousand" exoplanets, potentially doubling or tripping the number of known exoplanets! ☄️ #exoplanets

Finding out about Gaia at #EAS2025Cork! ☄️ Just announced: Gaia DR4 will be released in December 2026!

#exoplanets #jobs 📣 I'm advertising for a postdoc! Come work with me in sunny SoCal on the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team. You'll help build the pipeline for Roman* occurrence rates. *Launches NEXT YEAR! Please RT & share with your networks! aas.org/jobregister/...

Twelve ALMA/AGE-PRO papers just out! Exploring how gas and dust evolve in disks 🌟🌀 — Congrats to all authors! 🎉 NRAO press release: public.nrao.edu/news/alma-pl...

From Kaz Gary: For Pride Month, Astrobites is interviewing one transgender astronomer every week. This week we interviewed Dr. Eliot Halley Vrijmoet, a postdoctoral fellow at Smith College! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/06/06/e...

Hey, the paper is online! 🎉🪐🔭 #exoplanet Check out the shiny new NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoFOP paper, which covers all the updates to our data and services since Akeson+2013. Please update your .bib files and cite accordingly!! arxiv.org/abs/2506.03299

Fewer than 100 planets to go! 👀🪐🔭✨

Reboost for #astronomy and #exoplanet feed 🔭☄️🪐

Reboost for the #astronomy feed

Now hiring: 2 Tenure‑Track Faculty Positions | Institute of Astrophysics, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) – Santiago, Chile 🇨🇱 Full details & submission: astro.uc.cl/en/noticias/... #FacultyPosition #Astrophysics #AcademicJobs #ResearchCareers #PUC #Chile

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

New results from the Young Worlds Lab! arxiv.org/abs/2504.13262 So you measured a stars' rotation period using a TESS light curve, how good is it? That's the question we wanted to answer with this paper. 🔭🧪⭐🌌 #exoplanets

1/ Using ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, the exoALMA project has revealed exquisite images of young solar systems. By studying the motion of the gas astronomers may find signs of planets in the making. Read more in this @thenrao.bsky.social release: public.nrao.edu/news/exoalma/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets