I'm very excited and honoured to announce my new position 🧪🔭 in the UK, starting in January! See here for more info: www.ast.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

. @profsera.bsky.social (UvA) benoemd tot Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in Cambridge www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/sera-...

First time I saw it was when I lived in the US. I was the only person in the entire cinema who laughed at the “fridge magnate” joke. 😂

Peak World Cup that they just kept on drawing for Brazil's group over and over again until it came up Scotland. 🙄

Interesting journal club with the Exoplanets group at @physicsuol.bsky.social, looking at the transition from giant planets to brown dwarfs (arxiv.org/abs/2511.11818). They don't mention it, but is the gap at 2-3 MJ & [Fe/H]~0.2 called anything? If not, I'm calling it the Leicester doughnut hole 🔭

Rugby World Cup draw keeps with tradition: Scotland play Ireland, as always, and get a brutal path through the knockouts. England get the easiest group (and very nearly the weakest group possible), and a knockout draw that avoids any of the big teams until the semi-finals. 🙄

Finding amusement in the quirks of university systems. Due to the way the various data fields are truncated, the classes for my 4th-year course all appear in the timetable as "Supermassive Lecture..." 😂 🔭

Thoughts this morning. Yes, you can seal qualification for the World Cup with a string of clinical performances, winning every game and not conceding a single goal. But isn't it more fun to do it with a goal from inside your own half in the 8th minute of injury time? 😀 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Waking up to dozens of spectacular pictures of the aurora taken by friends and colleagues in north America. Sadly it's pouring rain outside my window, and not going to stop until...<checks forecast>...some time next week, so I suspect no chance of anything similar here.😢 🔭

🔭🧪🎢 PhD Project focus: Understanding protoplanetary disc evolution We're advertising this project with Prof Richard Alexander, making simulations of accretion of planet-forming discs onto their star. For details of all our PhD projects look here: le.ac.uk/study/resear... 🔭🧪🎢

See below for details of our Physics & Astronomy PhD admissions process in Leicester this year. I am advertising to recruit a new student to work on protoplanetary discs and planet formation, and my colleagues are offering a range of fascinating projects as well. 🔭

Looking to start a PhD in Physics & Astronomy in 2026? The team @physicsuol.bsky.social have announced their STFC-funded projects on offer next year, spanning astrophysics, planetary science, and space instrumentation. Deadline: Jan 18th, contact us to learn more! le.ac.uk/study/resear...

So happy to see this. Mills was the first place I got to see the night sky through a “real” telescope - it’s a fantastic facility. Best wishes for the big birthday celebrations. 🎉 🔭

With just under 12 hours to go, here's how JWST Cycle 5 proposal submissions are progressing according to our sampling of the star and planet formation people here in Leiden! We're well past the 1000 mark for the year (and 10,000 across all years!) now, but where will we end up?

Our annual PhD recruitment process @api.uva.nl is open!! Details of the process and projects are here, deadline November 3! 🔭 #astronomy #astrophysics werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Great to see our paper on methanol in TW Hya finally come out today (with Catherine Walsh and Jenny Calahan). A quick overview.... 🔭 ☄️ #radioastro arxiv.org/abs/2510.04106

Happy Father Dougal Day to those who celebrate. 🎉 (Admittedly that's basically just my third-year class, but we'll still have some fun with it.)

Marvelling at a request for a letter of reference that specifies both a font size and a page limit. I understand the need for guidelines, but who are the people who need to be told that letters of recommendation shouldn't run to more than 3 pages? 🔭

Reposting for the western time-zones... 👇🏻- thread about @simintong.bsky.social's excellent new paper on understanding turbulence and dust fragility in planet-forming discs. 🔭

New paper, led by @physicsuol.bsky.social PhD student @simintong.bsky.social. Simin looked at the rings we see in planet-forming discs, and combined new models with multi-wavelength ALMA observations to understand the underlying physical properties of the dust and gas. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24818

Very sad news. Ming Campbell was my MP when I was a kid, and he was a lovely man. I remember going to his surgery as part of a school project, and he talked with us - a pair of 12-year-olds - for half an hour, with the same earnestness as when he spoke in parliament. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Academic family tree of descendants, beautifully calligraphed by a colleague, hung in a place of honour.

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/

From guest author Rajat Saxena: Today’s bite looks at how planets are formed in the “bumps” of protoplanetary disks.🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/08/26/b...

Advertising email about a camping equipment sale doesn't even come close to using the phrase "Now is the summer of our discount tents". I'm so disappointed.

Bonus holiday activity - an afternoon watching the Tour de France from the roadside. 🤩 🇫🇷

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

#HST Cycle 33 results are starting to post! I'm super pumped to announce that I'm leading a long term monitoring project of the TW Hya disk, tracking the evolution of its unique disk shadows 🔭🧪 #astrosci

Today, in "old man learns Python": having written a 1-D accretion disc code from scratch in a Jupyter notebook, I managed to vectorise it so it runs only moderately slowly. 🎉 Didn't even ask ChatGPT! Still lots to figure out, but I guess old dogs can sometimes teach themselves a new trick or two. 😂

Snow Patrol at Glastonbury on TV. Don't want to say I'm old, but the first time I saw them live wasn't in this century, and the last time was...<checks>...18 years ago. 🫣

As an old dog in need of new tricks, I've finally bitten the bullet and installed Python. Installation smooth; actual coding fine so far. But also some real "WTAF?" discoveries, which I plan to list here. First up - slicing lists. The start value is inclusive, but the end value is exclusive. 🤦🏻‍♂️

International or UK researcher looking for a #fellowship in #astrophysics, #planetaryscience, and/or space instrumentation? Leicester @physicsuol.bsky.social is inviting expressions of interest for this year's STFC 5-year Ernest Rutherford Fellowships (deadline June 26th): le.ac.uk/physics/rese...

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...

🔭🧪 Congratulations to Prof Nial Tanvir who has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work studying gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions we've ever seen. le.ac.uk/news/2025/ma...

Today we're celebrating 100 years of Physics and Chemistry at Leicester. Ten Physics undergraduates started at Leicester in 1925, today it's more like 650 students. Ken Pounds sharing a history of space science and astronomy @physicsuol.bsky.social from the 1960s onwards.

It would help this discussion to look at recent publication trends. This is from ADS, total publications in all the AAS journals + MNRAS + A&A +JCAP. This year’s total is extrapolated from the first quarter. The feeling that things have changed suddenly is not an illusion.

Astronomers' chat here recently: i) authors complaining that their referee report is late. ii) referees complaining about how many review requests they get. iii) editors complaining that it's hard to find referees. No idea what the solution is, but it feels like the system is close to breaking... 🔭

We are hosting the 2025 UK & Ireland Discs meeting at the University of Hertfordshire (8-10 September). Topics include discs of all sorts, but especially protoplanetary discs and white dwarf debris discs. Abstract submission deadline is 15 May: ukidiscs.github.io/discs2025/ 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

Happy #exoALMA day! www.exoalma.com

I wrote a research note about the recent publication of the MIRI/LRS spectrum of K2-18b. The authors had claimed the detection of potential signs of life. I find the data to be consistent with a flat line 🔭🧪

The press release says there is a 0.3% false probability. This comes from a mistranslation of Bayesian to frequentist statistics. If you take the Bayes factor considering the 'maximal' set of molecules from the paper, the probability of no DMS and DMDS (1/(1+B)) is actually 27.6%. So close to 1σ.

Ignas Snellen from Leiden University not pulling any punches in the Volkskrant: "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This goes way beyond what I consider responsible science communication." (my translation)

will read this in more detail in the morning but a quick thread of some technical quirks: for context, "sigma"/confidence intervals here describe the preference of one model/hypothesis over another, not a signal strength over noise as in most types of "detections" 0/3 arxiv.org/abs/2504.12267

And once more for the western time-zones...🔭 Thread below on our new paper on the crazy misaligned exoplanet system IRAS04125, led by @becastro.bsky.social.

Wanna misalign a disc? Who ya gonna call? 👻 Please enjoy the fantastic summary by @richardalexander.bsky.social of our work on IRAS04125, the enigmatic planet-disc-binary misaligned system which we suggest is from a triple stellar system dissolution. Keep your eyes peeled for further work!

In terms of predictions, I'd also add that the encounter almost always leaves the planet-binary system at very high mutual inclination. If indeed they appear co-planar observationally, they're probably retrograde not prograde, if indeed a third body encounter is the culprit here

New paper, led by the amazing @becastro.bsky.social (with Jeremy Smallwood, Andrew Winter, @astrohoss.bsky.social, and others). In which we try to understand the formation of the crazy-looking young planetary system IRAS04125... 🤔 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2504.07182

My attempt at an #eclipse photo.

🎉 Congratulations to LPL Sagan Fellow Feng Long for the discovery of a 30 Myr-old primordial disk! 🚀 The gas inside the snowline is strikingly carbon-rich – key for planet formation. Don’t miss the paper and the press release! 🔗 #JWST #Exoplanets news.arizona.edu/news/james-w...

Alternatively: "how it started / how it's going" 😀 🔭 [my first undergrad research project / new paper out today ]