Very happy to share that I got awarded the IAU PhD Prize of Division F for my thesis on “Transmission spectroscopy of hot gas giant #exoplanets ” 🪐 I’m incredibly proud and happy, but also immensely grateful for all the support from supervisors, collaborators, friends and family through all this! ❤️

and Cyril Gapp developed a new method to characterize the 3Dness of hot Jupiters, from asymmetries due to planet rotation during transit.

Good week on the arXiv for MPIA grad students :) Annie von Stauffenberg measured a spectacularly high S/N spectrum of Beta Pic b with the new and improved GRAVITY+ instrument - she detects 13CO and potential variability!

Very exciting to finally be measuring magnetic fields of exoplanets!

"Someone, somewhere, has taken the decision to defund astrophysics research in the UK, but no-one seems quite sure who that was, or why." The latest on the impact of the catastrophic funding cuts to UK astrophysics, by me, in @natastron.nature.com 👩‍🔬🧪🔭 ✒️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Editorial Opportunity at the Journal of Open Source Software The Journal of Open Source Software - known to its friends as JOSS - is is a developer friendly, diamond open access journal for research software packages which has been running since 2016 and is enormously successful, publishing Open…

There's actually a pretty big risk that that's not the case - reducing launch costs and increasing difficulty getting permission to build data centers in many places makes it already somewhat economically viable; and the cooling isn't such a huge problem either. Great video that does the maths:

1/3 🔭 Exciting discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope! Researchers from MPIA and CfA | Harvard & Smithsonian analysed the rocky exoplanet LHS 3844 b, revealing a dark, hot surface likely composed of basalt. We are beginning to do #exogeology. 🌌 #Exoplanets #JWST www.mpia.de/news/science...

NASA just dropped more than 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. It'll take me a few days to go through them all, but so far it's one stunner after another. Link: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos... Credit: NASA/Artemis II Crew (h/t @jonostrower.com)

Please join @astroyami.bsky.social, Keren Duer-Milner, and I for a session on Giant Planets Across the Solar System and Beyond! meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC2026/ses...

Interview done! Now time to dig in to this really thorough, horrifying paper by Olivier Hainaut about what the night sky will look like with future satellites https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.09427 This is similar to the kind of modelling that I've done with my collaborators, but using totally […]

This Trans Day of Visibility, I want cis people to understand that we don't need "validation." We need *action.* Write to your representatives; call out transphobic language; write letters to the editor; campaign for gender-inclusive washrooms at your office, school, or business. *Do something.*🏳️‍⚧️

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

🔭🪐 Open question for the exoplaneteers on here: what gripes do you have with current 1D atmospheric modelling and retrieval packages? Are there features you'd like to see, or ways we could make your life easier?

🔭 New paper day from the ExoAimser group at Trinity College Dublin! Not one, but two exciting papers from PhD students @astrotoole.bsky.social and @maddielam.bsky.social. 🪐

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