"I am capable of having a complete thought before I ever formulate language from it. An LLM is not. Language is not thought." www.twelvemountains.com/2026/06/ai-a...

Will there be astronomers after AI? The short answer is yes, probably 🔭🧪

In fairness it took a lot longer than expected

I don’t actually understand why Reform ran someone against Burnham. Why give Labour the opportunity to beat them and gain momentum? Hopefully they’re this politically incompetent in the general election

I installed a LaTeX extension for VS Code, and it's so much faster at compiling than Overleaf. I've already decided to just put the LaTeX and Python in the same repository, so it makes sense to edit it all in the same app too.

My autocorrect is determined to make me use the phrase "gravitational lending". I assume that would be when you borrow enough to leave a black hole in your finances

"One early program employed teams of hairdressers put out of work by the execution of the aristocracy in the French Revolution to calculate logarithms."

A very short microlensing event in the Large Magellanic Cloud. I'm not convinced it's a primordial black hole like the authors suggest, but still very interesting 🔭🧪 www.twelvemountains.com/2026/06/a-mi...

Surely everyone thinks like this? xkcd.com/3253/

I’ve never been more scared of scare quotes

We don't think black holes can form with less than five solar masses, so why have we found black holes smaller than that? 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/the-imposs...

Weird that the headline makes this sound like it was somehow the dog’s fault

What are your most irritating hot weather myths? For me it's that watering plants when it's sunny can scorch the leaves. Absolutely not! Learn how lenses work. The focal length is not zero

Genuine question: Does this also apply to Google Drive, Gmail, etc now that AI is being shoehorned into everything?

It's easy to assume spammers and scammers know a scary amount about us, but then I repeatedly get spam advertising high performance gaskets when honestly I'm not really sure what a gasket even is

I can't be the only one who always briefly reads "omw" as "oh my word!"

They always deny they're going to resign right up until the moment they resign.

Amazing video. I also find it unreasonably funny that the linked article about volcanoes starts by talking about the movie Twister of all things (albeit for a good reason) 🧪

Honestly, my biggest problem with First Past the Post is the name. A horse race is a terrible analogy for the person with the most votes winning

Newton would still be on Twitter and would only post to shit talk his political rivals.

It’s also worth remembering that the Apollo computer used hand-woven core rope memory and manually assembled integrated circuits www.sciencenews.org/article/core...

A surprisingly large part of being an astronomer is relatives asking if you saw the meteor shower last night and having no idea what one they’re talking about

What could make a star disappear from the sky for months and then come back like nothing happened? 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/the-star-t...

Hubble! 🧪🔭 www.space.com/astronomy/hu...

We could replace the Lords with an elected upper house. Similar idea to the US Senate with long terms and not all reelected at once. Elect a third of them at each general election or something.

There's no legit reason for any published paper to have any incorrect or nonexistent references. Every recent paper has a DOI which can be used to check the metadata. There are a finite number of pre-DOI papers, so make a whitelist. If the refs aren't real it shouldn't get as far as being reviewed.

The Zooniverse just hit 3 million registered volunteers! Congratulations, folks! 🧪

Only a matter of time until this happens with code to introduce security vulnerabilities via coding agents. Maybe it’s happened already

Sorry, but this dog is clearly more excited to see the other human

Imagining them trying on their tiny space suits

Build up courage, says the draft dodger who never takes responsibility for anything

A thousand years old and still going, Hubble observations show 25 years of the expansion of the Crab Nebula, the continuation of a supernova explosion observed in 1054 🧪🔭 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z4I...

The Rubin alert stream started last month, combining the effort of astronomers and engineers all over the world three-alpha.space/p/the-world-... 🧪🔭

You know what doesn’t get more expensive every time some arsehole starts a war? The wind

"Quicker than the speed of thought" is a terrifying phrase to hear in the context of killing other humans. Killing doesn't need to be quicker. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

There are loads of undiscovered black holes in the galaxy, and you can help find them! I wrote this post about what my job actually is three-alpha.space/p/join-the-s... 🧪🔭

I always think I’m going to read on the train and then don’t do it. I’ve just figured out that the reason is that the social awkwardness of sitting next to/face-to-face with strangers is super distracting

“The sun might be on the back of a big beetle—a dung beetle, maybe.” 🧪 Not as far fetched as it should be

The kids kept me awake so much the Health app is trying to console me

There is absolutely no replacement for professional work done by a person who knows what they are doing.

A new generation of observatories is on the brink of letting us see the stars like never before. That also means we have more to lose than ever 🧪🔭 three-alpha.space/p/we-have-al...

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... 🔭🧪