As a part of the soft launch of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series in July, Dr. Michael Radica gave a talk on how we discern the three dimensional structure of exoplanet atmospheres from observations. The video is now available. #exoplanets #astronomy www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOw7...

As a part of the launch of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series, Dr. Ryan MacDonald (@distantworlds.space) gave a great overview of our current understanding of rocky worlds thanks to JWST. The talk is now up on Youtube if you're interested. #exoplanets #astronomy www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN3y...

We observed the habitable zone planet TRAPPIST-1e with JWST to search for an atmosphere. You've seen the headlines, now let's dive into the science! 🧪 THREAD (1/N) #Exoplanets 🔭

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

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

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

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Avi Loeb has gotten US Rep Luna to write NASA admin Duffy with a demand to repurpose Juno to rendezvous with 3I/Atlas. This is so far out of line I don't know where to start.

If you want know all things #HabitableWorldsObservatory then follow @drjovian.bsky.social for the next two days as she posts from the #HWO25 meeting in Washington DC. Thanks Jo for keeping us posted ☺️

This is very cool.

My student Abubakar Fadul's most recent paper is now on arXiv! He found evidence of ethylene glycol (aka antifreeze) and glycolonitrile in a protoplanetary disk. If confirmed, these will be the most complex organics seen in a disk! 🔭🧪☄️ arxiv.org/abs/2507.14905

Happy to share the first paper from the SPACE Program, led by my student Angelique Kahle! she observed a hot little sub-Neptune, HD 86226c (Rp = 2.3 Re; equilibrium temp = 1300 K). arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13439 The spectrum is *really* flat ! here's the amplitude compared to other gaseous planets.

The dark forest hypothesis ("The galaxy seems quiet because #aliens fear being attacked if they are noisy.") is stupid. A thread apropos of absolutely nothing, totally.

Kodak, when confronted with the rise of digital photography, went big on investments in…film. Which is why you don’t hear about Kodak anymore. In a related dynamic, the United States, when confronted with the rise of clean energy, went big on investments in… oil.

My paper with Tom Evans-Soma and Nathan Mayne on magnetic drag models is now accepted and up on the arXiv. For a quick summary, look at the PDF of my Exoclimes poster that I shared last week. www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.08511

We all need to be more thoughtful about where we put our money. If you're giving $10/month to a left-wing podcast/streamer/etc. who has limited expenses but makes $100k+/month from donations, you can probably safely divert your money to ProPublica, etc., and get better results for your money.

It is with great pleasure that I share MAXMINDS 2.0, a new Max Planck program to support scholars in danger of displacement by war or natural disasters, and who have limited access to resources and institutional support. If you know affected scholars, please share. www.maxminds.mpg.de

Excited to be at Exoclimes (@exoclimes.bsky.social) this week! Come find me at poster 139 🪐 I'm building a retrieval framework to help make sense of variability in brown dwarfs and directly imaged planets. Come say hi, and we can nerd out about variable atmospheres 😊

As I sit at Exoclimes listening to a Zoom talk from the UK, I thought I'd share this again. When choosing where to host international meetings, we need to consider the ability of attendees to get visas in a timely manner.

Since many people can't make it to Exoclimes, here is my poster looking at the geometry of magnetic drag models in hot Jupiter atmospheres. There are many caveats about the applicability of these models, but they're a first step in including dayside coupling. www.duncanchristie.net/s/exoclimes_...

Huge congratulations to @sophiavaughan.bsky.social for receiving the Michael Penston Prize from the RAS!!! Sophia is a pioneer in detecting reflected light from exoplanets. Congrats on this well-deserved recognition 😁🔭

My new paper, co-authored with Duncan Christie and Jun Yang, on 3D chemical kinetics simulations of K2-18b has been accepted by MNRAS! This is Part I of a series. In Part I, we examine the planet's atmospheric dynamics and its impact on the transport of passive tracers. arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891

Jiachen Liu (@jiachenliu.bsky.social) has a very interesting paper out where she looks at the dynamics of K2-18b, modelled as a mini-Neptune. www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891

I've had multiple non-science people genuinely tell me that all of the American scientific workforce will be absorbed by other countries and...no, people. If we want to keep science at the level it's been at, we need to save US science.

Important editorial in @nature.com. As I said a decade ago in an op-ed in the @nytimes.com (back when they were publishing stuff like that), "If You See Something, Say Something" (www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/o...) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Visitor visa processing times for Canada, by country where you are applying from: Germany/Austria: 315d UK: 343d Citizens of these countries are visa-exempt, but many researchers who aren't visa-exempt live there. As a Canadian about to head to Canada for a conference, I'm embarrassed.

Super proud of Nora Bachmann for her first first-author paper, a deep dive into the classic hot Jupiter, HD 209458b! arxiv.org/abs/2506.16232

I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future. But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.

Chicago! ICE is kidnapping people out of their immigration hearings daily-- start your day by showing up for our communities! ICE watch starts daily at 8am outside 55 E Monroe and 50 E Adams

17% transit depth! A Saturn-size transiting exoplanet orbiting a small 0.2 M_Sun star: arxiv.org/abs/2506.07931

A very important point by Captain Exoplanet.

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

To the scientists who shared their work and kept pressure building against the Trump Admin for 100 straight hours: thank you for your relentlessness. We owe you a future of climate safety.

Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺

🚨 ACTION ALERT 🚨 Good morning!! It’s easy in these times to feel like the problems are big and we are small. Trump is relying on us to give in to that feeling. But there are steps we can take — in coalition. Please help us save cosmic science ♥️ 🔭🧪⚛️ more of my thoughts on this here:

Blog post by our Editor-in-Chief astro.theoj.org/post/3243-fund

🔭☄️

Here's NASA astrophysics, if I read the president's proposed budget correctly. 🔭

Now would be a great time to start advocating for science funding. @planetarysociety.bsky.social has some great resources 🔭🧪 www.planetary.org/save-nasa-sc... Save NASA Science - Action Hub | The Planetary Society

I will be giving a talk called "What we learn about Earth’s climate from studying Mars’s global dust storms and Titan’s methane rain" about how the cuts impact my research at 1 AM EDT (in 3 hours) on the wclivestream.com/watch/

The bipartisan framing of Chinese people as dangerous to the United States has been building up for years and has created this deeply racist and xenophobic opening for the Trump administration. I stand with my Chinese colleagues and all of our Chinese students. 🧪

Here's my follow-up story on K2-18b, the distant planet where scientists claimed to see a possible sign of life last month. In three preprints, other researcher argue that the signal is noise. nyti.ms/4jaqQRv

Within the context of the interdisciplinary PRELIFE consortium me and Wim van Westrenen are advertising a joint PhD position on the surface water levels and atmospheric composition of the earliest Earth: www.formingworlds.space/phdposition2.... Deadline: 10th June. Please share! 🌋🌏🧬

We will never get journals to switch to having multiple referees if we are barely capable of finding a single referee per paper.

Do letters really serve a purpose to the community anymore? What in the content of most letters warrants shorter review and publication timelines? No doubt there is a desire by authors to get the process over with quickly, but I'm not sure that's good for astronomy.

Useful resources for US folks. www.savensf.com/take-action

Planetary scientists have been really, really mad about DEI-related conference abstracts being taken down from LPI meeting sites. I wrote about it: www.nature.com/articles/d41...