Gibson et al. “TESS Discovers a Second System of Transiting Exocomets in the Extreme Debris Disk of RZ Psc” showing 24 exocomet transits and the existence of a broken power law for the sizes of these exocomets, unlike Beta Pic’s exocomet distribution #exoplanet #astrodon #astrosci
A lovely morning to go rowing in #Leiden - my sculling needs improvement, but it’s fantastic to be on the water on these calm Autumn days.
Santos-Sanz+ with “JWST occultation reveals unforeseen complexity in Chariklo’s ring system” - I’m fascinated by #exorings and seeing more activity and weirdness with small bodies in the Solar system gets me very intrigued indeed….. #astrosci #astrodon
Getting mentally prepared to read all the #slack channels on #wispit2 #JWST proposals
Wolff, @andrasgaspar.bsky.social et al. with a beautiful analysis of “JWST/MIRI Imaging of the Warm Dust Component of the Epsilon Eridani Debris Disk”, the last of the “Big Four” circumstellar disks with #JWST - a smooth disk at all but the longer wavelengths and hosting an RV #exoplanet ☄️
Cugno and Grant @sierragrant.bsky.social with “A Carbon-rich Disk Surrounding a Planetary-mass Companion” detected using #JWST - an impressive detection of several different carbon molecules that are very promising for #exomoon formation around the directly imaged #exoplanet CT Cha b ☄
A very cool result! Julo+ with a paper on “Stellar halo subtraction … with integral field spectroscopy… on the PDS70, HTLup, and YSES1 systems” showing that the YSES 1b #exoplanet has a lot of emission lines - H alpha , H beta, He I, Ca H and K triplets, Na in absorption… oh my! #astrodon ☄
Some sad #exoplanets news in a paper led by me: “YSES 2b is a background star”. A distant M dwarf star some 2 kiloparsecs behind the star just so happens to have a non-zero proper motion in EXACTLY the wrong direction: this required multiple GRAVITY observations to solve… #astrosci #astrodon
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/
Two papers announcing the discovery of a directly imaged 6 Jupiter mass planet around binary system HD 143811 AB Squicciarini+ and Jones+ in Sco-Cen - Keck, Gemini and VLT all imaging this companion and confirmed with several years of common proper motion. #astrodon #exoplanet #exosci
We had WISPIT 2 yesterday, and today we have van Capelleveen et al. with “WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): Two directly imaged exoplanets around the Sun-like stellar binary WISPIT 1” with 10 and 4 Jupiter mass planets at 338 and 840 au respectively #astrodon #exoplanet #exosci
Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b, 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 🔭 🧪
Resorting to somewhat extreme methods to focus my easily distracted self in the last week of #astronomy grant writing #AcademicChatter
“If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air,
Quaint little villages, here and there…”
#SouthCoast #BluebirdCafe #GrooveArmada
“At the river” by Groove Armada
If you are rowing in the Netherlands, you get used to sharing the waterways with the occasional BFB. Weirdly enough their wakes are not a problem if you’re sculling, but smaller cruisers can cast waves big enough to flood your footwell. I’m lucky I can get to enjoy the waterways here.
Once again, don’t trust the output of any #AI assistant without verification. This is not the HR 8799 exoplanet system, it’s the YSES 1 exoplanet system. Source: my (then) grad student Alex Bohn took this image using VLT/SPHERE. #astrodon #astronomy #exoplanets
I stumbled upon a terrifying plot legend in Wen (2025) “Updated Earth Tomography Using Atmospheric Neutrinos at IceCube”: “Vacuum earth is 5.16 sigma away” - but in which direction? Should we be nervous? Relieved? How far away is a sigma, exactly? So many questions!
XKCD is hitting uncomfortably close to my group’s #exoplanet research! #astrodon
Dr. Kielan Hoch has a #Nature paper on #JWST observations of the star YSES 1 with its two gas giant planets. She and her team have discovered a circumplanetary disk around the larger 1b and silicate clouds in 1c. Wonderful results and more to come - watch this space! #exoplanet #astrodon
Wow! Bryant+ with “A giant planet transiting a 0.2 solar mass host star” that has a transit depth of almost 20% - with that depth, this will be ideal for a very detailed spectroscopic study in the future. A very interesting outlier. #astrodon #exoplanets
Together with Sebastiaan Haffert our review on “High-Contrast Coronagraphy” is out - writing an ARA&A review has been on my academic bucket list, and I’m very proud of the result. It uses the showyourwork! framework, making it a completely reproducible paper. #FAIR #astrodon #exoplanets
I’m in Belfast this week, giving an Astrophysics Research Centre Seminar at #QUB on Wednesday 26th March titled “Scattered: Wide separation directly imaged exoplanets and shattered exomoons” (also soliciting pub recommendations!) #astrodon #exoplanets 🔭🪐 🌗🎆
I keep forgetting when and where telescope observing cycles/periods are, so I spent a part of this morning making this spreadsheet which you can view. I will attempt to keep it updated (and yes, P116 is 7 months, not six!) #astrodon #exoplanets 🔭🪐
Congratulations to Crawford+ for eliciting an audible groan from me with their paper title: “Peaky Finders: Characterizing Double-Peaked Type IIb Supernovae in Large-Scale Live-Stream Photometric Surveys” but the big question is if they have a Nick Cave song to go with it… #GolfClap
A seriously impressive paper by Thompson+ on the “Revised Mass and Orbit of ε Eridani b: A 1 Jupiter-Mass Planet on a Near-Circular Orbit”. They’ve combined RV, direct imaging and absolute astrometry to revise the planet to ~1 M_Jup and e~0 - close to being a Solar System analogue. 🔭🪐 #astrodon
