An unexpected rainbow after six weeks of almost unbroken cloud cover here in the Netherlands.
An unexpected rainbow after six weeks of almost unbroken cloud cover here in the Netherlands.
Hon, Rappaport et al. on “A Disintegrating Rocky Planet with Prominent Comet-like Tails Around a Bright Star” with an orbital period of 1.27 days, this is a fascinating fourth example of this type of object. The eclipses vary from one orbit to another. ππͺ #astrodon
Is there another massive exoplanet in the Beta Pic system? Lacquement+ on “Dynamics of the Beta Pictoris planetary system and possibility of an additional planet” show that the two known planets cannot sculpt the current circumstellar disk, but an additional one (or two) planets can! #astrodon ππͺ
Happy Perihelion Day! The Earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical, and today is when the Earth is closest to the Sun. I also had a clear shot of the Dutch/NATO communications bunker near our house, which earned a 500kt nuclear device on Russian bombing maps in case of World War III :) ππͺ #astrodon
Happy Arbitrary Time Change Day! May you have good times with friends and family in the next 31 and a half million seconds :)
I do love a good Cornu spiral! DeForest+ on “A Simplified Theory of External Occulters for Solar Coronagraphs” might work for exoplanet imaging - occulters are simple in concept, but typical numerical approximations we commonly use in astronomy don’t work: this paper looks at new ones. ππͺ #astrodon
After spending a week in England under a permanent fog layer, flying back yesterday and seeing the sun as we broke through the cloud deck was “Trinity seeing the Sun for the first time” levels of epic.
50% gray - Boxing Day, South coast of England
One of the graduate students I work with had access to my office whilst I was away, and I have been discovering photos of me hidden around my office. Apparently I haven’t even found half of them yet… they have been very creative in the hiding spots!
The tilt of the bulge is the thing: Poon et al. on “A potential exomoon from the predicted planet obliquity of Ξ² Pictoris b” showing that if upcoming JWST observations confirm a suspected obliquity then there may be a massive exomoon to detect! Keep calm and carry on observing…. ππͺ #astrodon
End of this teaching semester vibe.
Wow, imagine how differently astronomy would have developed if you had planets orbiting in completely different planes in the sky… Yu+ on “A possible misaligned orbit for the young planet AU Mic c” and the coincidence that we see BOTH transits is astonishing. The Universe is weird. ππͺ #astrodon
Merc and Boffin show an “Unequivocal detection of the tidal deformation of a red giant in a binary system via interferometry” with reconstruction from PIONIER fringes - their Roche-lobe filling model fits better than a symmetric model. An amazing result! ππͺ #astrodon
They Might Be Giants in #London at the #Roundhouse tonight - sold out gig and they pulled an amazing trick - they sang a song backwards and recorded it, and after the intermission, the video was played backwards to reveal it was “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love”! #TMBG #Flood
A masters student working on high resolution spectra of Beta Pictoris made river plots of the circumstellar absorption from several hundred epochs…. the human brain is fantastic at spotting trends in these plots, I love them! ππͺ #astrodon
Fascinating paper by Ma+ on Temporal and chromatic variation of polarized scattered light in the outer disk of PDS 70 indicating that shadows are being cast by an (unseen) tilted inner disk, giving us more dynamical information on this system ππͺ #astrodon
Whelp… I guess we are now going to be in the “find out” phase. Best of luck, everyone.
WOndering out loud, how long before the AI image algorithms drum up a Langford Parrot and we’ll
An auspicious start to the week in #Leiden at the Science faculty and Leiden Observatory this morning #astrodon ππͺ
Monday evening on the 14 October was the first chance to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in the evening sky in #Leiden. A 10 second exposure on my ancient DSLR picked it up (along with the 19:15 from LHR to AMS). Barely visible with the naked eye as this is towards playing fields. #astrodon ππͺ
StrΓΈm with a short review on “Exocomets, exoasteroids and exomoons” featuring a nice review of the exocomet orbital properties and models. #astrodon ππͺ
super puff == ringed planet. Lu+ speaking truth with “The Dynamical History of HIP-41378 f – Oblique Exorings Masquerading as a Puffy Planet”. ‘Nuff said. ππͺ #astrodon
Our department servers are down, #ADS and #arXiv are down, many people I know have head colds and are incapacitated, and there is a majestic naked eye comet in our skies. I am stubbornly refusing to draw any conclusions between these events and ‘harbingers of doom’ here… #astrodon πͺπβοΈ
Damn straight! ππͺ #astrodon
A clever idea: use the area covered by a transiting exoplanet to get a narrow band stellar spectrum from a rapidly rotating star! Secrets in the shadow: High precision stellar abundances of fast-rotating A-type exoplanet host stars through transit spectroscopy by Lam+ πͺπ #astrodon
