I want to fit this cocoa price chart and determine the effective temperature of this obvious Y dwarf, I might see phosphine absorption halfway through 2024

My most common questions from the public: - has JWST discovered aliens / why haven’t we discovered aliens - what happened before the Big Bang - what’s inside a black hole (also TikToks they saw about the earth being flat/the moon landing being fake, or sensationalized media attention to articles)

My talk is today at 1 PM Pacific, and if you're interested, you can watch live online, too, you just have to register at the link!

there’s this weird edit of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck where they edit out every other beat and I’ve used it in softball and it sounds insane and I would love to hear a crowd try to sing along to Brian Johnson’s unintelligible half syllables

I spent my evening doing a deep research dive into Star Trek, because I'm giving a talk on Tuesday here in Tucson about the cultural impact of the series. These shows, and these stories, are so important to me as they helped me understand our responsibility to each other, and to our curiosity.

we have steely dan at home

talking at carnegie today with an astronomer about infrared selection of AGNs and she said "ah, so, [the technique] is reliable but not complete" and I think I want that as a t-shirt RELIABLE BUT NOT COMPLETE

Oh also I owe a lot to the help of my co-authors @bemiles.bsky.social, @markmarley.bsky.social and @jarron.bsky.social because I’m ostensibly an extragalactic scientist. It’s so great to meet people who know a lot more than you do about anything (it’s a great reason for universities to exist)

Ok, so, I should correct myself: Tucson doesn't get to 120, but Phoenix has gotten up there. So imagine an object the size of Jupiter with an atmosphere the temperature of Arizona desert in the height of summer; *in JADES we could see this object even if it was 4000-5000 light years away.*

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

Today is my birthday, *and* it's a Pythagorean triple, 9 / 16 / 25. This sort of thing really got a lot of Greek mathematicians excited, until they had to reckon with what would happen to the length (c) if (a) and (b) were 1, that awful irrational square root of two.

I own a pair of these deep field socks, and they're what I've worn to so many public JWST talks and they always get a great reaction from folks who notice. I might have to pick up a second pair, not because mine have worn out, but just because I love them so much.

@jparish.bsky.social A number of years ago I stumbled on the story behind A Link to the Past's Chris Houlihan Room, including the letter sent to Chris from Nintendo Power. I finally decided to make a video about it all, in case you're interested. youtu.be/SY00ri_a9y4?...

Last night, the Steward Observatory summer softball team (The "StrOHs") won the league championship game, 12-2. I've been playing summer softball through some good and a *lot* of bad years. It felt pretty damn great to win last night, capping a fun season. This was the StrOH's *first* championship!

A few months ago Flandrau Planetarium asked if I wanted to do a show, so I said yes and then my wife and I wrote something and performed it tonight, some of it was me talking about astronomy and some of it was her playing music and it was good. Sometimes you get through this all by loving.

hey I really recommend getting to know your nice retired neighbor and inviting him over for dinner and cooking a pretty good shrimp creole and just talking with him about his recent trip to Chicago to see the Cubs at Wrigley for the first time in his life It’s a great way to spend an evening

The poet Andrea Gibson passed away. They were an incredible writer, live performer, and their work had a huge impact on people around the world. I do a lot of these astronomy shows, and often I think about how I can soften the science, how I can make it something more like what I saw from Andrea.

My grad student Jake Helton defended his PhD successfully today. I'm so excited for him to head on to Penn State for a postdoctoral appointment in the fall. At UofA, grad students are awarded crowns and capes for their PhD, and here's the elaborate History of the Universe cape I painted for him.

About to go live here on Youtube! www.youtube.com/live/hQWt3P4...

THIS EVENING, I'm talking about those mysterious "Little Red Dot" galaxies seen with JWST in a public "Deep Space Dialogue" facilitated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Little Red Dots are super weird! 4:00 PM Pacific / 7:00 PM Eastern, live on Youtube! www.stsci.edu/contents/eve...

I was asked to give the keynote for the Arizona Science Teachers Association last night, and I spoke about the origin of the elements and what JWST can tell us about how atoms are put together. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHih... (...but also I talked about science education in this country!)

This is a screen grab from yesterday’s University of Arizona College of Science Commencement, where I hooded my graduate student Jake Helton. I’m very proud and I urged the crowd to get louder because getting a PhD is intensely difficult and I wanted him to hear the ~10k people cheering for him

People often ask if JWST has "replaced" Hubble, and I like to say they're siblings, working together to give us unique views of the Universe. My friend and former grad school compatriot Kathy Kornei wrote a great article about HST on it's 35th anniversary. www.sciencenews.org/article/hubb...

I *love* Jurassic Park. I know that there are a lot more important things going on, but I just posted a 45 minute deep dive into the paleontology, biology, and math that inspired the book and the movie, in honor of @blankcheck.bsky.social's upcoming Jurassic Park episode. youtu.be/XpnbqcZg7VE?...

So, I've spent the last few months doing a deep dive into Jurassic Park because, well, Blank Check (@blankcheck.bsky.social) is about to cover the film. I'm making a series of videos/essays about the film for next week, here's a little sneak peek from my video on the "Pre-History of Jurassic Park."

When I'm interviewed about the power of JWST, I always worry I'm perhaps being too hyperbolic or enthusiastic about what we've learned (and what we have yet to learn!) from this powerful telescope. This video shows off that I'm not alone! I love hearing so many familiar voices gushing about JWST.

So, remember when I posted about this amazing galaxy? Well, the paper has been accepted in Nature, and there's a wonderful write-up out today, with this very cool visualization showing the galaxy sneakily sitting between two big, more nearby sources: webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

Bill is one of the pioneers of exploring these enormous oxygen regions kicked up and lit by supermassive black hole accretion! It’s fun to surprise astronomers with weird new things in our weird diverse Universe.

Oh, and ESA just made a really cool video that shows you just how much you'd have to zoom in to find JADES-GS-z14-0 on the sky. It's amazing to think about just how many other galaxies we haven't seen yet but we know are out there. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QjS...

Last year, we stumbled on this *remarkable* galaxy at the edge of some JADES data. The green emission in the central panel is enormous (82 THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS ACROSS) plumes of oxygen gas extending to either side of this relatively normal galaxy, seen one billion years after the Big Bang.

after raining all night, the clouds rolled away just in time to give me a nice look at the ol' moon here, as she slips into our shadow.

my wife is on tour, and it was really nice a week and a half ago to come into the office and listen to her on the radio in Nashville. Her tour ends this week and I'm not going to lie, I'm excited to have her home. youtu.be/ItJaZGQ_7FE

My graduate student, Jake Helton, and I, were profiled as part of this fun piece on his recent Nature Astronomy article about the oxygen detection in the most distant galaxy. This morning, we found out he was awarded 60+ hours with JWST to further explore this! news.arizona.edu/news/james-w...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g1S... One of my favorite things to do is give people a "Tour of the Night Sky," where instead of naming the stars and constellations, I talk about the beauty and fragility of existence, and our responsibilities as living beings. Here's one of my talks, recorded last year:

each time a friend of mine has a kid and they name that kid henry I paint them a candy bar

you’re telling me, keynote slide

fixed a typo in a paper where the author had referred to the "thigh redshift Universe"

I love karaoke

I had a lot of fun performing You and Infinity at the Tucson Fringe Festival this afternoon. We had a wonderful turnout and the response to the show has really warmed my heart.

The Bubble Nebula tonight, from my backyard. It was discovered first in 1787 by (of course), William Herschel, and it’s inflated by one bright O type star glowing almost ten thousand light years away.

Wait there’s a 2025 after this one but why

do yourself a favor and put on Jurassic Park at 11:49:39 tonight, so that right when midnight comes, John Hammond pops the cork on this pilfered bottle of champagne. then, as is tradition: "we were saving that!" "for today, I guarantee it!"

Day 25 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Most Distant Known Galaxy. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have found a record-breaking distant galaxy observed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Merry Christmas everyone! www.theatlantic.com/photo/2024/1...

The Atlantic included JADES-GS-z14-0 as the final entry in their wonderful 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar. It's a real honor, given the beautiful images that we got from space this year. www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

I know that this is pretty common, but if I could one day embody even the fraction of the love and kindness that this man provided I would be a successful person. Every time I think about who this person was I become an emotional mess.

This is it! I happened to see the asteroid 54 Alexandra earlier this month while looking at the California Nebula. Here's the ephemera for the motion of the asteroid that night, and the red is between 3:10 and 5:25 UTC that night. Thanks, Tim, for helping!

If you are in or around Tucson on January 11th of 2025, I'll be doing a one-man show that I've written about Infinity as part of the Tucson Fringe Festival. It's me, an overhead projector, and some existential dread. It'll be funny, I promise! www.simpletix.com/e/you-and-in...

I'm fairly busy but not too busy that when a colleague jokes about how his daughter is only into one specific song from the Frozen soundtrack, but wishes he had versions in other languages he could play to break up the monotony, I'll go and find a bunch and send them to him, cackling

Tonight I was that insufferable astronomy dork who brought my little telescope to a Christmas party and showed everyone the Veil Nebula and the moon. I swear it was fun for people! It’s neat to show your friends the wonders of the Universe from an urban backyard.

Tonight I focused on the California Nebula, which is fairly faint but still quite impressive. I assume that’s Lompoc down there in the lower left.