The physics-based realities of Santa’s Christmas Eve present-delivering extravaganza by Dr George Dransfield! 🦌🛷

Parents & anyone else up early on Christmas morning: there’s a bright pass of the International Space Station over the UK, just after 6.15. Well, I say it’s the ISS. Could be Santa heading home… Exact timings for where you are at www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary....

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...

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscopic slide. 🫧🐻🧪

Wonderful news, congratulations Prof Markoff, very much looking forward to you joining the UK astronomy community!

Interested in finding transiting planets at long periods, e.g. with the @platomissioncon.bsky.social? We just published a Research Note led by Geert Jan Talens, showing that such transits can be much longer or shorter than usually assumed iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

🌞🛰️Sun-watcher SOHO turns 30! 🎂 "SOHO has overcome nail-biting challenges to become one of the longest-operating space missions of all time" – Prof. @cmundell.esa.int , ESA Director of Science 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭🧪

Eminent researchers have written an open letter to the Chilean Government appealing for the protection of the #DarkSkies above our Paranal Observatory, threatened by the industrial complex INNA — planned to be located just a few kilometres away. https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann25009 🔭 🧪

Pretty exciting news, a long-thought possibly - that dry dust storms produce enough static energy to create little lighting bolts - has been kind of observed on Mars!! 🧪🔭 #planetsci doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We are hiring a new Assistant Professor in Astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin!! ☘ Job ad here: aas.org/jobregister/... Deadline: Jan 02 2026 Please share widely! 🪐🔭

Webb has revealed for the first time that there are four shells of dust around this pair of Wolf-Rayet stars, which are known as Apep. Read more 👉 https://esawebb.org/images/wolf-rayet-apep/ 🔭

Soon… 🤩 #ExoELT

Remember that lovely aurora last week? Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱 🧵

Lots of fun work out from APEx postdocs in the past week! first up was Sophia Vaughan @sophiavaughan.bsky.social on a deep search for reflected light from a hot Neptune w/ the VLT. This summed up light from ALL FOUR 8m telescopes over 2 nights- a preview of ELT-like data! arxiv.org/abs/2511.08691

⭐️🔭Applications open at Anton Pannekoek Institute in Amsterdam for the 7th ASPIRE program: aspire.science.uva.nl. This 2026 summer school provides astronomy research experience for talented MSc students from countries where opportunities to move into a PhD program are limited. [1/2]

But what about the ELT instruments themselves I hear you ask, how big are they? Well, dear reader, they are giraffe-sized and weigh four elephants #ExoELT 👀🦒🐘

It’s #ExoELT week! A week dedicated to discussing all things exoplanets and the ELT, @eso.org’s 39-m telescope coming online in 2029 😱 The size of this machine is just extraordinary. You can fit a whole VLT telescope on its Nasmyth platform 🤯

I may have to form a rock band, so I can use this as the cover of our first cd. www.livescience.com/space/the-su...

3I/ATLAS is the first interstellar object bright enough for amateurs to image: so fabulous to see the delight ☄️😍

On Saturday we held the inaugural Afternoon of Astrophysics in @oxfordphysics.bsky.social. Myself, Prof Suzanne Aigrain @airbornegrain.bsky.social and Prof Jayne Birkby @jaynebirkby.bsky.social discussed the cutting edge of exoplanet research with the public, moderated by @chrislintott.bsky.social

Londoners! Drink excellent wine and chat with me about space, next week: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cosmology-...

🤩 moving doors!

Are you a grad student interested in writing for Astrobites, or do you know one? We're recruiting! Apply by November 26 :) astrobites.org/2025/10/31/a...

We are awarding our President's Medal to 'In Our Time' as it has done so much to showcase humanities & social sciences. We'd decided this before the news of Melvyn Bragg stepping down, but glad we got our timing right & had a chance to celebrate with him! www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/renowne...

📈 Record interest in ERC Starting Grants 2026! 4,807 proposals - a 22% increase compared to last year’s call. 👩‍🔬 Women submitted nearly 43% of proposals - the highest share ever recorded in an ERC call. More stats 👉 bit.ly/4hcYJln #ChooseEurope

Cosmologists! We have a faculty job going here in Oxford - happy to answer questions. Brief version is that this remains a great & collaborative place to do science and the students are superb. 🔭 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOP628/a...

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 🔭🧪⚒️☄️

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Happy 30th discovery day 51 Peg b! We're at Observatoire de Haute Provence where it all happened, listening to Michel Mayor & Didier Queloz tell us all about that extraordinary radial velocity discovery with ELODIE on the 1.93m in 1995 and the incredible exoplanet science that followed. What a day!

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

We *absolutely* should celebrate it. Do your part by enjoying the 200+ page masterpiece in its entirety on ADS! ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1925PhDT... 🔭 Special shoutout to Figure 2, an incredible piece of art that I want on my wall (and suspect could even make an excellent tattoo if executed well?)

Cantiello @kantyellow.bsky.social at @flatironinstitute.org explains, in terms of fundamental physics, why we won’t be simulating stars in full 3D, ever. I likey.

The official number of exoplanets has surpassed 6,000! And you can access data on all 6,007 of them right here at IPAC 📈 🪐 Watch the video & read all about the center of the exoplanet universe (also known as NExScI!) here: www.ipac.caltech.edu/news/the-nas...

1/ A rising telescope under a rising Sun and Moon! 🔭☀️🌕 This montage is a kaleidoscope of moments from the construction of our Extremely Large Telescope. Creating this #ELT collage took Boris Häußler, an ESO astronomer in Chile, years of meticulous planning.

My periodic reminder for #astrosci #astrodon #exoplanets Early Career Researchers to please, please, please have a simple web site with your current email address on it - rationale here: kenworthy.space/advice/

😮🤩 safe journey HARPS3!

Serious Q for the 🔭 community: is anyone planning to observe the 3I/ATLAS comet with any of the large ground-based telescopes (VLT etc) any time soon before it gets too close to the Sun (which is when)? Or have maybe already done so? ☄️💫

I am community sourcing a list of people who are actively in search of MS/PhD students in planetary science/astrobiology/exoplanets for Fall 2026. If you are such a person, please fill out the following google form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Yes, high spectral resolution in space is surely the future for exoplanets. It doesn't even need to be that "high" res, JWST's R=2,700 is delivering great science, just think what could be done with a R=3,000-5,000 integral field spectrograph behind a coronagraph on HWO 🤯

gorgeous new JWST spectrum of the rogue planet PSO J318 from @paulmolliere.bsky.social ! Strong absorption at 10 microns likely due to small SiO particles, acting as seeds for cloud formation arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18691

Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea... 🔭

Want to come and join our lovely facilitation team in Oxford Physics? my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Stunning data, brightness maps of the supergiant star Antares showing its convective cells 😲 congrats Pilate et al.! ⭐

You can read more about how high resolution spectroscopy can constrain sub-Neptune atmospheres (and provide constraints that are comparable with JWST…) in the paper we published this year! (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025MNRA...)

One of the many #ExoclimesVII groundhogs, enjoying a nibble of grass on a sunny Montreal day

Exoclimes VII has officially begun!! 👽🧑‍🚀👩‍🚀🚀🚀 Things have kicked off with some welcoming words from our fearless leaders Lisa Dang @astrolisadang.bsky.social & Romain Allart! And now off to our first review talk from Nicolas Cowan about Exoplanet atmospheric Dynamics 🪐☄️

In our new paper we model the complete evolution of L 98-59 d from 'birth' up to the present day. We show that it cannot be a gas dwarf or a water world; it's a 'hybrid' planet with an H2-rich atmosphere containing H2S and SO2 (photochemistry!), and a deep magma ocean. @timlichtenberg.bsky.social

Absolutely thrilled for Dr Sophia Vaughan, winner of the RAS Michael Penston Thesis Prize! Congratulations @sophiavaughan.bsky.social, very much deserved and it's been an absolute pleasure working with you! Bring on the ELTs! @oxfordphysics.bsky.social www.physics.ox.ac.uk/news/dr-vaug...

New paper out! This is a review of the published JWST observations of rocky exoplanets so far: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00933 Quick summary of the key points:

It’s paper day 🎉!! If you are interested in seeing how supergranulation changes over a solar cycle in RVs give it a read! arxiv.org/abs/2506.23693