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  • 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!

    The top left corner of a scientific plot with a beige label with the text "Vacuum earth is 5.16 sigma away"
    → 8:06 AM, Jul 15

  • XKCD is hitting uncomfortably close to my group’s #exoplanet research! #astrodon

    XKCD comic showing over a dozen exoplanets orbiting around a star. These include a faint dust cloud, several gas giants, and a pulsar.
    → 8:59 PM, Jun 16

  • 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

    The two gas giant planets YSES 1b has a circumplanetary disk surrounding a purple coloured visualisation of the gas giant, and a sandy coloured gas giant 1c in the lower right. The star can be seen in the distance. The image is by Ell Bogat at UMD.
    → 7:56 PM, Jun 10

  • 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

    Three transit curves of the planet moving in front of the star, showing a U shaped dip down to 80% of full flux. The last figure shows raidal velocity measurements consistent with a planetary mass object.
    → 9:16 AM, Jun 10

  • 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

    Different telescope mirror apertures and their resultant point spread functions.
    → 3:40 PM, Jun 4

  • 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 🔭🪐 🌗🎆

    A Mustill plot, named by me. Made by Alex Mustil, this is a Venn set-like structure made of nested boxes representing planets and their gravitational domain. Multicolored lines go from left to right in the boxes, representing exomoons, and when they scatter and interact, they move from one box to another.A wireframe sculpture of a female figure holding up a hoop. The sculpture is against a blue sky dotted with clouds. It is called "The Beacon of Hope".

    → 10:28 AM, Mar 25

  • 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 🔭🪐

    A spreadsheet of telescope observing periods
    → 10:48 AM, Mar 15

  • 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

    → 7:08 AM, Mar 6

  • 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

    Twelve panels showing the past and future predicted positions of E Eridani b as coloured lasso hoops all lying roughly on top of one another, showing that the different detection methods agree with each other.A plot showing the probable mass of the planet versus the inclination of its orbit. There's a nice tight grouping superimposed on a weak horseshoe shaped cloud of possible points.

    → 11:08 AM, Mar 3

  • Clear sky last night allowed me to see the Moon and Venus (pictured), Mars and Jupiter but no joy with Saturn or Mercury which were both buried in twilight. Lovely Earthshine, though. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    The deepening twilight sky with the silhouette of an electricity pylon in the foregroud, taken from a low angle looking up. The thin crescent Moon is in the lower part, with Earthshine visible. Venus glows brightly in between the pylon framework.
    → 10:51 AM, Mar 2

  • I enjoy teaching, but after teaching/managing three courses last semester and now having a semester free of teaching for the first time in five years, I am burning through those residual research TODOs for several papers… wheee! #AcademicChatter

    Me dancing through a green field, holding a giant green lollipop. (Caution: it is really Father Jack from "Father Ted" being nice)
    → 10:16 AM, Feb 27

  • Sometimes several feelings can be conveyed in only a couple dozen words…

    A paper card pinned up on a wooden shelf in a bookshop. The card has somewhat frantically written words in a pencil that may have been pressed a bit too hard, as if the author was extremely frustrated. The card reads: "Dear self-help browsers: no section gets as disorgansied as this one. PLEASE FOCUS! and respect alphabetical order. You will not only help us and the other customers, you will also help your self. THANK YOU."
    → 10:40 PM, Feb 25

  • A direct imaging claim by Lagrange+ [https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15081](“Evidence for a sub-jovian planet in the young TWA7 disk”) - a very clear point source but only one epoch… but it’s in the gap in the disk around the star. Will be exciting to see follow up. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    An image with a black circle in the middle that represents the blocked out light of the central star, with a bright point source to the upper left of the star at about 1 arcsecond. To the right is another point source, a background star and a galaxy.An image taken in polarized scattered light, showing the circumstellar disk around the star. The disk is face on and symmetric, apart from a wide faint gap in the upper left. The position of the gap is identical to the location of the candidate companion.

    → 10:23 AM, Feb 24

  • The giant ring transit ASASSN-21js is following the model prediction we made in our paper last year - the latest ASASSN data shows a slower rise than expected, but still consistent with a ringed disk. We still predict it finishing somewhere in 2026. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    → 1:12 PM, Feb 14

  • I was asked what the most critical component of successful astronomy research was. My immediate response: “Colleagues who do what they agreed to do, in the time frame they said they would do it in. Treasure them dearly and reciprocate.” beat Them: “…that’s it?” Me: “Pretty much!” 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    → 3:41 PM, Jan 31

  • “Life in the Slow Lane: A Search for Long Term Variability in ASAS-SN” - Petz and Kochanek show the power of all sky surveys over many years - some absolutely fascinating behaviour in these light curves, from dust generation to curious eclipsing systems. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    Six light curves of stars with ten year baselines, showing very different behaviour. Rapid variation over tens of days, with long term trends where the star brightens gradually or fades.
    → 9:03 AM, Jan 27

  • Not all those who wander are lost: Bhaskar and Perets on “Properties of Free Floating Planets Ejected through Planet-Planet Scattering” showing that 40-80% of planets are ejected (with small velocities), and that 5-10 planets per star can match the free floating planet population 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    → 9:48 AM, Jan 24

  • A summary of the DASCH project culminating in the DR7: Williams on “DASCH: Bringing 100+ Years of Photographic Data into the 21st Century and Beyond” - this project has brought online photographic plate photometry spanning over 100 years. Astounding, brilliant and tough work. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    → 9:22 AM, Jan 23

  • Astonishing - intensity interferometry in your backyard! Mozdzen+ on “Intensity Interferometer Results on Sirius with 0.25 m Telescopes” with consumer Single Photon Avalanche Detectors. I’m genuinely amazed at what can be done - precision timing to hundreds of picoseconds(!) 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    A small white telescop dome on a gravel back yard, with the dome open and a 0.25m telescope pointing off to the right. A second identical telescoope sits outside and points in the same direction. The Sun shines on both telescopes from the left.A graph showing the g(2) correlation function from the experiment. It is a noisy line with one sharp distinct peak at about 202 nanoseconds.

    → 9:53 AM, Jan 20

  • An unexpected rainbow after six weeks of almost unbroken cloud cover here in the Netherlands.

    → 10:15 AM, Jan 13

  • 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. 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    Several panels showing the brightness of the star as a function of time. The star is blocked by a dust tail which creates a light curve with an initially steep drop, followed by a slow rise back to the normal flux of the star. Each eclipse has a slightly different depth and shape.
    → 12:29 PM, Jan 10

  • 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 🔭🪐

    Two fuzzy grey circles represent the simulation of the disk around beta pictoris. Two small circles indicete the known exoplanets, and two additional larger circles the orbits of two hypothetical planets. The other figure shows the position of the four planets and the inner edge of the disk that is sculpted by them.
    → 9:25 AM, Jan 7

  • 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 :) 🔭🪐 #astrodon

    Blue skies over a large radio tower on the left, next to a low trapezoidal structure covered in winter trees. This is a concrete bunker built during the Cold War, covered in soil and several trees. In the foreground, a canal shows a reflection of the radio tower.
    → 11:34 AM, Jan 4

  • Happy Arbitrary Time Change Day! May you have good times with friends and family in the next 31 and a half million seconds :)

    A computer terminal window running the date program, showing Wed 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 CET
    → 10:42 AM, Jan 1
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