I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING #JWSTCycle5

“Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside." Read every word.

Fellow astronomers, please submit your name if you'd like to join the Astronomers for Planet Earth (@a4e.org) statement on the proposed megaconstellations 🔭

Astronomers for Planet Earth are submitting a statement about some of the proposed megaconstellations that would ruin ground-based astronomy to the FCC. You can read the statement below: 🔭☄️

Publication day for our paper on the T2.5 brown dwarf/exoplanet analog SIMP0136! We find cloud formation appears to drive upper atmospheric temperature and chemical structure. We also debut a new, novel method for vertical mapping extrasolar atmospheric dynamics. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

There are lots of aspects of silicate clouds in substellar objects that we don't often think about. Luckily, Sarah Moran (@offallingstars.bsky.social) and Elijah Mullens are here to fill us in on the interesting details. #exoplanets #astronomy www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWZ...

bluesky, the canadian sports app

Astronomers: highly recommend this thoughtful opinion piece by @hogg.bsky.social on how to think about our field in light of the development of large language models. whether you agree with him or not it’s vital to discuss the principles behind our science. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181

Announcing the 8th Other Worlds Laboratory (OWL) Exoplanet Summer Program, Aug 10-27, 2026. We wish to foster new and existing research collaborations by outstanding visitors, with stays of 1 to 3 weeks at the beautiful UC Santa Cruz campus. Applications accepted Feb 5-March 5. owl.ucsc.edu/summer/

The Atlantic Magazine just dropped a tremendous story on the Minnesota Resistance. The author is a war correspondent & sees the echoes of leaderless community empowerment around the globe: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... (supposed to be a gift link, might not work, it’s in Apple News, too.)

I am hiring a postdoc in exoplanet atmospheres! (ASIAA, 4yrs, funded through 2030) Job ad here. Feel free to reach out if there are any questions! aas.org/jobregister/... PS. There’s also another postdoc position in cosmology with an awesome colleague

We're so excited to share the results of the ALMA large program ARKS that studied the distribution of dust and gas in a sample of 24 exoKuiper belts. With @lucaroundtheworld.bsky.social, Meredith Hughes and a large collaboration, we just published 10 papers presenting our first results arkslp.org

1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

NASA Discovers Distant Planet With Conditions That Could Sustain Rocks https://theonion.com/nasa-discovers-distant-planet-with-conditions-that-could-sustain-rocks/

He's being pretty subtle about the real reasons for his war

Are you a bachelor or master student anywhere in the world, and would like to come to us to work full-time on a supervised research project? Applications for the 2026 MPIA Summer Internship are open now!

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...

🔭 A bit late, but I've finally put together a zenodo archive for the JWST observations and retrievals of SIMP-0136, based on my paper from earlier this year. If you want to play around with this super interesting models, or dive into the results, it's all available at zenodo.org/records/1785...! 🧪

The demand to use #NASAWebb shows no signs of slowing! For its fifth year, researchers around the world submitted a record-breaking 2,900+ proposals. The types of requests show astronomers are ready to answer even bolder scientific questions: https://bit.ly/4nYC0LS 🔭 🧪

Lammers and Winn “On the Exoplanet Yield of Gaia Astrometry” makes breathtaking predictions for the Gaia DR4 data release in December 2026 - around 7500 new exoplanets around nearby stars! It will be revolutionary… and indicate new nearby systems to be imaged… #astrodon #exoplanets ☄️

Hey, astronomers. Can you imagine astronomy research without ADS?!?!? No? So, have you filled out the ADS survey yet? Help archives help you! (Help archives keep funding!) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Absolutely floored to have received an award for "open and inclusive" #scicomm and outreach. I'm not usually one to broadcast such things, but I think highlighting this type of work is more important than ever. Please consider getting involved in your own communities! 🔭🧪 www.uu.se/institution/...

Super useful stuff from @jlothringer.bsky.social! Now that we're starting to measure compositions with decent precision it's important to worry about what we mean by 'solar' or 'metallicity', and make sure that we're comparing apples to apples!

Exciting opportunity for anyone looking to start a PhD! I can only give the highest praise to @paulmolliere.bsky.social as a supervisor! 🔭

Books Upstairs is a fine store with a particularly excellent poetry section. Why not support them by ordering your books online instead: booksupstairs.ie

I wrote another paper! And yes it's about brown dwarfs wait don't go anywhere they're really neat arxiv.org/abs/2510.00111

The Norman Lockyer Fellowship is a great opportunity for postdoc research in #Exoplanets, and we'd love to host you at St Andrews! Feel free to reach out if you're interested in joining our exoplanet group in beautiful Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🪐

I’m thrilled to announce a new paper that went up on the arXiv last night: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02260! The paper finds and maps the connections between clouds, temperature structure, and chemistry in the isolate exoplanet analog SIMP 0136. Very grateful to all my collaborators and co-authors!

Great article in @discovermag.bsky.social about our work on SIMP-0136!

I'm really excited about this one! It's fantastic working with Dr. Yayaati Chachan: arxiv.org/abs/2509.20428 "Revising the Giant Planet Mass-Metallicity Relation: Deciphering the Formation Sequence of Giant Planets" Lots of great nuggets her, including that even super-Jupiters are very metal-rich.

🔭 It's paper day! Today I'm sharing the latest in a series of papers looking at the weather on other worlds, in this case bringing you the weather report from a nearby T-dwarf, SIMP-0136. 🪐 🧵 to follow...

*So* excited about our pre-print on TSD: Transmission Spectroscopy Decomposition, a novel algorithm that basically delivers your nIR high res #exoplanet 's transmission spectrum without PCA/SYSREM. There might be a 🧵 later, so for now, I'll let this speak for itself... ⬇️ arxiv.org/abs/2509.12737 🧪🔭

We have job opportunities in the APEx department at MPIA - please spread the word! Postdocs: aas.org/jobregister/... Tenure-track staff: aas.org/jobregister/... Max Planck Research Group Leaders: aas.org/jobregister/... + happy to host ERC, Humboldt, and other third-party funds.

✨✨✨Another Virga advert✨✨✨ Introducing V2.0, with fractal aggregate clouds! Restricted to spheres no more! We handle the dynamics and the optics self consistently. Led by me and PhD candidate extraordinaire Matt Lodge (who is looking for a postdoc 👀 and is amazing). arxiv.org/abs/2509.06708

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

A very hungry planet! 🪐 What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞 Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets 📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Legendary quote by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social. No additional comment necessary. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b#LeidenObservatory a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet clearing a path in a circumstellar disk. Laird Close and his team saw it in H-alpha, indicating gas accretion #astrodon 🔭 🧪

I think it's really worth noting that this concentration camp was opened one month and three days ago. This woman saw enough horror in that time to quit and tell the public what she saw. Which suggests that it's not as bad as we think, or as bad as we can envision from her description—it's worse.

I've had a few other former astronomers reach out to me lately about transitioning into data science/ML, and I decided to write about it. This is my personal journey from astro to ocean, and the most useful steps I took along the way.

Our paper on PSO J318 is finally out 💪 . I want to thank all of my coauthors who made this study possible 🙇 !! It could be that we see the first cloud seeding nuclei forming at the top of the atmosphere…? arxiv.org/abs/2507.18691

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

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.

Congratulations to Dr. Allison McCarthy, who successfully defended her PhD “The Physical Basis for L and T Dwarf Variability” on Friday! Allie is now off to Trinity College Dublin for a postdoc with the ExoAimsir group led by Prof. Johanna Vos! 🪐🔭 @alliemccarthy.bsky.social @johannavos.bsky.social

Octofitter v7, now released! This release overhauls the modelling syntax and add some powerful new capabilities for advanced users. [1/4] (Octofitter is a package for Bayesian modelling of exoplanet orbits)

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

I recommend giving this paper by @jiachenliu.bsky.social, @astroduncan.bsky.social, and Jun Yang a close read: arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891. Sub-Neptunes like K2-18b lie in an interesting regime where both the radiative feedback and mixing of chemical tracers is important, I’m looking forward to Part 2!

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 successfully defended my thesis and am now Dr. Caprice Phillips (its got a nice ring to it!). So thankful for my advisors and mentors including Jackie Faherty and @ohdearz.bsky.social and friends who were here to support me. Im the 2nd Black women to get a PhD from my department. Full of joy.