Check out this great new photo of an unusual protoplanetary disk three-alpha.space/p/a-deliciou... 🧪🔭

Your regular reminder that the effects of relativity are *measurable* www.discovermagazine.com/einstein-s-t... 🧪🔭

I’ve been writing code for 25 years, and I still haven’t gotten over the novelty of being able to make the computer do new things it couldn’t do before.

What's left after a large galaxy tears apart a small one? And how can that help in the search for dark matter? three-alpha.space/p/when-a-gal... 🔭🧪

TIL we can use the waste brine from desalination plants to generate electricity, offsetting some of the power used by the plant www.earth.com/news/japan-a... 🧪

How do they know it’s because Batman is unexpected and not because he’s seen as a moral authority (albeit fictional)? What happens if you send in the Riddler? 🧪

It annoys me because it gives a false impression. To the casual reader it must seem like “AI” is a single, new technology that came out nowhere and is suddenly being used for loads of different research. None of which is true.

It's me! Read below to find out about my research and how that involves citizen science 🔭🧪

It's fascinating to read all these different interpretations of aurorae. People have been trying to make sense of the night sky for a long, long time www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic... 🔭🧪

Researchers who use machine learning need to stop calling it AI in their press releases. It makes it sound like they’re using ChatGPT or something.

I know I'm biased, but astronomy is so cool. Imagine detecting a burst of radio waves from space and being able to to figure out it was caused by a bunch of material exploding off of a star orbitaltoday.com/2025/11/14/a... 🧪🔭

One amazing type of observations can tell astronomers a huge amount. So how does it work? three-alpha.space/p/first-ligh... 🔭🧪

You know you’re emailing an academic when you get an out of office message saying they can’t reply, followed three minutes later by a detailed reply

Happy “my neighbours won’t let me get my kids to sleep” night to all who celebrate

This black hole has one bright jet and one that’s too faint to see. The reason is relativity and the weird things that happen near the speed of light 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/a-black-ho...

3. ⁠this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government. FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.

Our supposedly left wing government torching civil liberties because they’re incapable of stopping the far right from setting the agenda apple.news/Af2BhztikQ3u...

Exciting news guys! I just got followed by someone who is only following 74k other people

There were recently new images of two similar sounding but very different objects, the Butterfly Star and the Butterfly Nebula. I explain the difference 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/butterflie...

History is full of powerful dictators, all remembered as villains. Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Caesar. Imagine what would have to be wrong with you to want to add yourself to that list

"If we are quiet enough, they are sure to forget we are here. They’re not just looking for pretexts at this point, to do what they were always going to do." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Love this. LIGO is more likely to detect gravitational waves at night and during weekends. It's also less likely to detect things on Tuesdays. All because the detectors are more likely to be running at certain times/days. 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.11849

Sorry, can't work today, too busy screaming at the state of the world

Out for a nighttime dog walk and caught the eclipse through the clouds 🔭

Objectively harder to read with Liquid Glass

A 36 billion solar mass black hole was recently discovered. That’s hard to imagine, so I’ve worked out how wide it would be compared to the Solar System. It’s, um, rather large 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/the-bigges...

Pretty sure this "vulnerability" in python-future is nonsense. Supposedly vulnerable because it imports "test" and an attacker could create a file named "test.py" in sys.path. But if the attacker can do that they could spoof literally any imported module github.com/advisories/G...

In a growing number of slack channels I no longer need, for no reason other than I only think of them when someone says something and it would look passive aggressive to leave right after

We learned last month that Betelgeuse probably has a small, hard to see companion. But how do stars end up in binaries, anyway? The answer is all in how stars form in the first place 🔭🧪 three-alpha.space/p/a-companio...

Apparently GPT-5 is a PhD-level expert on "everything" yet it can't correctly identify an incorrectly folded light curve of a pulsating star. It looks nothing like an eclipsing binary or an exoplanet. I think my job is safe for now 🧪🔭

I assume it's a technical limitation, but it seems crazy that it's so hard to separate commands from data in LLMs. It's like the old phone system where you could get free calls if you whistled the right way.

My son (4) asked me to build him a den. Luckily he drew me a detailed plan of how it should look 😬

How can we tell interstellar objects are actually from outside the solar system? Partly because we understand how gravity works (more or less) 🔭🧪 three-alpha.space/p/we-know-it...

Oh cool, Rubin managed to detect 3I/ATLAS before anyone knew it existed. It's going to find *so many* of these, isn't it? 🧪🔭 www.universetoday.com/articles/app...

AI chat bot will no longer call itself Hitler #NotTheOnion www.theverge.com/x-ai/707442/...

Recently, two different papers have claimed to have found the Universe’s “missing matter” with very different methods. What’s going on? Have they both found the same thing? Let me explain 🔭🧪 three-alpha.space/p/has-the-un...

Ordered a solar filter from eBay and this is how it arrived 😒 I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find these to buy online. Can anyone recommend somewhere (in the UK) to buy filters for a Celestron Astromaster 130? 🔭

17 papers on Arxiv caught including prompt injection attacks to get favourable reviews from AI reviewers www.schneier.com/blog/archive... 🧪

Once again I learn the hard way how important it is to actually *plot* your data to see what's going on. I've been trying to figure out why some simulations were behaving weirdly. Plotting the data showed that 50% of them only had one data point (instead of thousands) because of a silly bug. 🧪

A Jupiter-sized exoplanet has been found using gravitational microlensing, which takes advantage of the planet and its star magnifying the light from a background star. Unusually, this planet is in the galactic halo rather than the centre, where microlensing would be more likely 🔭🧪

Now wondering how many of these Rubin will find. I’m guessing there will be a lot of them

We really are in so much trouble Full article here: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

More supermassive black holes are hidden by dust than previously estimated, meaning there are probably a lot more of them in the universe than we thought 🔭🧪 www.earth.com/news/superma...

Rubin is just getting started. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/a-revoluti...

85 miles wide! The largest comet ever found originally came from the Oort cloud and is now inside the orbit of Neptune. The closest it will get will be near the orbit of Saturn in 2031, so it won’t be visible to the naked eye 🧪🔭 www.space.com/astronomy/so...

A white dwarf has been found which is in a short-lived early phase when it’s beginning to accrete matter from a stellar companion. "We have never before caught a system in the act of spinning so rapidly but also slowing down dramatically, all while gaining mass from its companion." 🧪🔭

There’s a naked-eye visible nova in Lupus. Not visible from the UK, but if you’re further south you may be able to see it 🔭🧪 www.forbes.com/sites/jamiec...

A huge cloud of energised particles (known as a radio halo) revealed in new radio observations of a galaxy cluster 5 billion light years away. It’s the largest one ever seen, 20 million light years across 🧪🔭 scitechdaily.com/invisible-st...

Like last week’s story about the spin of the M87 black hole, similar analysis of the Milky Way black hole finds it is spinning at between 80% and 90% of the maximum 🧪🔭 www.newscientist.com/article/2484...

If you grew up in the UK in the 80s/90s, you should check you had all your vaccinations. I just checked and apparently I had a single measles vaccine as a baby and one dose of MMR later, which doesn't fully protect you. Just booked an MMR vaccination in a couple of weeks 🧪