BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”

I claim best quote from Nobel prize winner Francis Halzen in this 2015 story: “We are in the happy situation that there are not enough Muppets,” he says. “We’ve run out of Muppets." www.newscientist.com/article/2053...

Neutrinos from inside Earth and deep space illuminate the cosmos | New Scientist

A batch of ghostly, chargeless particles have been caught coming from inside Earth and from deep space

newscientist.com

@aussiastronomer.bsky.social! Here's the other stuff Chris Smith said that may be helpful to astronomers! Will have office hours on Wed, Oct 7 at 2pm ET and Thurs, Oct 15 at 3pm ET. 🔭

Yall wanna see a 2 hour old highland cow

If anyone thinks it matters, as of last year (2025), the Open Journal of Astrophysics is a Q1 Journal. It is the only Diamond Open Access Journal with that status in Astronomy and Astrophysics. www.scimagojr.com/journalrank....

I once made a joke about Pluto in an outreach talk to a younger audience and the blank stares I received were absolutely crushing.

Astronomy can wait, I must know the conclusion to this journey

sarah jeong@sarahjeong.bsky.social · 3w ago

lol my flight got diverted because of a medical emergency and they landed us in reykjavik in the middle of the night and deplaned us and sent us through passport control and then the crew vanished and then british airways sent us links to book an overnight hotel room but for a hotel at heathrow

Ok, this "there are two separate brains" thing appears to be making the rounds, and I want to be absolutely clear: this is a press office overhyping some perfectly reasonable science that won't come as a surprise to most developmental biologists.

Gabatha@gabatha.bsky.social · 3w ago

So we are a two-brained species after all... Interesting. #urantia #UrantiaBook www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

📝 This Wednesday is the autumn equinox (already) which means it's time for the twice-annual show that is Chicagohenge. I wrote a bit about it, suggestions on where to shoot, and in general trying to answer the question "how do I know if I'm gonna have good weather for a sunset" #photography #Chicago

Chicagohenge & Shooting A Sunset - dust

Coming up soon, at time of writing, is the second edition of the bi-yearly phenomenon known as “Chicagohenge.” To make a long story short, Chicago’s layout sits on a due north/south/east/west sort of ...

dust.aerojad.com

ALMOST DARK GALAXIES ARE JUST CLASSICAL DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES. WE EXPECT TO FIND THEM EVERYWHERE. THEY DON'T NEED A NEW NAME. ALSO THEY'RE ACTUALLY QUITE BRIGHT. This has been a public service announcement. 🔭🧪☄️

The Trump admin has decimated American science budgets, taking away life saving opportunities, and the potential for groundbreaking discoveries. This is how you destroy American innovation. apnews.com/article/trum...

Trump administration has cut or frozen $177 billion in grants across every state, analysis shows

An analysis finds that the Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term.

apnews.com

OK people need to stop finding objects “more metal poor than a few percent solar” and calling them Population III star candidates. This is getting absurd.

The US National Science Foundation Directorate for Geosciences, which has funded most of my research over the past three decades, has been enshitified by Trump and his lackeys.

Brandon Bishop@brandontbishop.bsky.social · 4w ago

Stand by for "Updates from the NSF Directorate for Geosciences" Webinar.... Where we find out more 'bout our Doom.

Note this contradicts the FAQ answer.

For anyone not following the drama, there's been apparently a big development in ai math, along with some accusations of very bad behavior by OpenAI. But we don't have details yet. If I understand it, Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge made a big discovery on Navier-Stokes. Events go something like this:

Michael Barany@mbarany.com · last mo.

copying here so it's in-thread too bsky.app/profile/mbar...

astrobites.org/2026/09/08/r... We (ie @wcerny.bsky.social ) found a (candidate) dwarf galaxy!

An Early Discovery by Rubin Observatory!

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has found a new ultra-faint dwarf galaxy in our galactic backyard just by using preview data, taken before its 10-year survey!

astrobites.org

Oooh, a bracket! www.mineralcup.org/2026/bracket

Last day of #KICPDM is the best day, dwarf galaxies! :D This thread is Ting Li, Jiaxuan Li, Andrew Pace, Kaia Atzberger, and Alyson Brooks. I am chairing so let’s see how I do with the skeeting..

I feel like your life is headed in a bad direction when you start thinking “maybe I should do some work on the Galactic bar” 😵‍💫

Wheeeeee aas.org/posts/news/2...

Julian Munoz: the UV luminosity function of high-z galaxies also constrains power spectrum (lots of degeneracies as M_UV closer to SFR the Mstar, can partially break with clustering). With JWST/GLIMPSE can reach k~30 #KICPDM

Mariangela Lisanti reviews three examples of dark sector interactions. CDM is quite unusual, no standard model equivalent. p-n scattering >> self-interacting dark matter, hydrogen atom >> disspiative/atomic dark matter, EM plasma >> dark plasma #KICPDM

Vera Gluscevic starts with "read this paper for everything I won't get to" arxiv.org/abs/2607.28564 #KICPDM

Dark Matter Constraints from Small-Scale Cosmic Structure

Small-scale cosmic structure provides a powerful test of the fundamental nature of dark matter (DM). A wide range of DM models impact matter clustering on small scales, including warm, fuzzy, and (sel...

arxiv.org

Stephanie O'Niel is adding velocity-dependent and anisotropic SIDM to FIRE simulations #KICPDM

@spacewsarah.bsky.social : stellar streams probe DM with subhalo perturabtions, host halo shapes, and stream frequency. Perturbations to globular cluster streams is one of the most exciting topics because it could probe star-free DM halos. #KICPDM

I’m at the Dark Matter Probe Combination workshop at KICP this week, let’s try conference skeeting for the first time since coming over to blue sky! Will use #KICPDM as the tag and try to thread…

Ok that’s too close to home with the university’s AI nonsense.

McSweeney's@mcsweeneys.net · 2mo ago

"Such a radical shakeup in learning has never happened before, as far as I know. Is there even a way to learn about whether or not something has happened before? A method or tradition for studying prior events? No, that’s impossible. That’s not in the modules." buff.ly/AGaHs7b

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.

nature.com

😭

Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A high-risk mission to save NASA’s Swift Observatory has ended in failure after its rescue spacecraft spun out of control in Earth orbit. Swift will likely burn up in the atmosphere later this year, leaving a glaring gap in astronomers’ cosmic studies.