ever wonder: 🛸 are aliens real? ☀️ is our solar system unique? 🌍 how can we tell if there’s life on another planet? 📈 should we destroy capitalism? 🧑‍🔬 how could i become an astrobiologist? CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF STARSHIPS has the answer! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cloudy-wit...

Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos

Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for books, NOOK ebooks & magazines. Shop music, movies, toys & games, too. Receive free shipping with your Barnes & Noble Membership.

barnesandnoble.com

Our latest paper has been accepted for publication! 🎉 We demonstrated that a single late infall event perturbing the outer disk can trigger the formation of multiple giant planets and ringed disk structures resembling those observed around young stars. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.18370

🔭 Applications are now open for the Doctoral and Master Program in Astrophysics at the Institute of Astrophysics UC. 🌌 Research excellence across galaxy evolution, exoplanets, cosmology, stellar populations & more 💰 Full scholarships & stipends for all admitted students 📅 Deadline: July 31, 2026

here you go!!

Last week, I uploaded my first first-author paper as Dr. Prinoth to arXiv, and I finally have time to tell you about it. This one has been a long time coming, and I'm incredibly happy and proud that it's finally out in the #exoplanets world! 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2606.14490 1/n

A population view of transiting hot giant exoplanets: Tracing Fe and Ti chemistry with ESPRESSO and MAROON-X

Hot and ultra-hot Jupiters offer a unique laboratory to study atmospheric chemistry at the population level using ground-based high-resolution spectroscopy. Fe and Ti are key tracers of thermal and ch...

arxiv.org

I love this new paper about planets in AGN disks around supermassive black holes! arxiv.org/abs/2605.19241 Naturally, it also helps to motivate some of the crazy planetary systems I've built: planetplanet.net/2018/06/01/t...

Active Galactic Nucleus Tori: Potential Birthplace to Millions of Planets

The outer regions of AGN disks have temperatures similar to those of circumstellar disks, permitting dust condensation. Therefore, planet formation and growth could be active in these dust tori throug...

arxiv.org

Speedrun xkcd.com/3246/

Masterstudent UvA ontdekt ‘amandelvormige’ exoplaneet op rand van uiteenvallen www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/maste...

New HR diagram mnemonic dropped: Very Bad Computer Program Gives Me Misinformation

Linn Boldt-Christmas@nplinnspace.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

Fund NASA science or we’re demoting it again to comet.

Jeff Foust@jfoust.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Isaacman: very much in the camp of making Pluto a planet again. Working on some papers right now to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this. And that's it.

Casassus+ on Hourly radio variability of PDS70c from time-differential photometry using the ALMA array to see fluctuations around this exoplanet and circumplanetary disk. Very cool to see how quickly this flux can change! #astrodon #exoplanets

New research note accepted to RNAAS! Yes, this is a serious science post today. 🧪 We've created a catalog of Gaia DR3 IDs that correspond to TESS Input Catalog IDs! No more cross-matching on your own or hoping the Gaia DR2/DR3 IDs are the same! arxiv.org/abs/2603.28850 🔭 #exoplanets

Gaia DR3 IDs for TESS Input Catalog Targets

The TESS Input Catalog (TIC) was built on Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2). To date, there has not been an update to the TIC to incorporate Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) IDs. In this Research Note, we outline ho...

arxiv.org

Star Formation xkcd.com/3222/

What if Earth-sized HZ worlds don’t have exactly Earth-like climate feedbacks? Climate Chaos, Snowballs, run-aways - but also many temperate yet not-Earth-like worlds! Congrats to Chaucer Langbert on this cool study! arxiv.org/abs/2602.10369 @uarizonalpl.bsky.social @stewardobservatory.bsky.social

Not Earth-like Yet Temperate? More Generic Climate Feedback Configurations Still Allow Temperate Climates in Habitable Zone Exo-Earth Candidates

Earth's climate is influenced by over a dozen feedbacks, but only three dominate its long-term climate behavior. Models of the exoplanet habitable zone (HZ) assume that this is similar for other Earth...

arxiv.org

It's happening!!! Pandora is going to space in just over 16 hours (if all goes well). Pandora is going to help us study exoplanet atmospheres, even when their host stars are misbehaving. I am headed up to Vandenberg to watch the launch shortly, and will make a thread about the mission/launch here!

Ever wondered how many bins to choose when making a histogram of data? The answer is that you shouldn't choose a number of bins yourself! ☄️ #astrocode Here's a little notebook explaining how to make less biased histograms:

Making histograms is a common way to estimate the true density distribution of a sample. But how can we choose the number of histogram bins? And if we get fancy and use kernel density estimation (KDE)...

Making histograms is a common way to estimate the true density distribution of a sample. But how can we choose the number of histogram bins? And if we get fancy and use kernel density estimation (K...

gist.github.com

I'm very happy I woke up at 4am this morning to catch 3I/ATLAS right before its closest approach to Earth (today!) This interstellar visitor is traveling over 60 km/s ☄️ At 269 million km (1.8 AU), I took a series of 2.5 min exposures with my Seestar 🔭

The application for the ESO Summer Research Programme 2026 has just opened! It‘s a six week programme in Garching close to Munich where pre-Ph.D students can work on a hands-on project. Working at @eso.org is a fabulous experience, so please help me spread the word ✨ 🔗 eso.org/sci/meetings...

the day is finally here: you can order my debut non-fiction, CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF STARSHIPS: HOW THE DRAKE EQUATION REVEALS THE ODDS OF LIFE IN THE COSMOS from B&N!! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cloudy-wit...

⭐️✨🔭Please help us get the message out about the 7th annual international ASPIRE program at @api.uva.nl. This summer 2026 school provides astronomy research experience for talented MSc students from countries where opportunities to move into a PhD program are limited. Applications are due 17 Dec! ⭐️✨🔭

Equating giant planet occurrence rate of ~20% to the disk fraction, that means a timescale of ~10 Myr for giant planet formation!

Emily Hunt@emily.space · 8mo ago

New paper led by Fabian Polnitzcky & with @sratzenboeck.bsky.social + @joaoalves.bsky.social: based on the ages of stars with infrared excess in Sco-Cen, it seems planet-forming disks last around twice as long as previous estimates suggest - giving twice as long for planets to form. 🔭☄️ #exoplanets

New paper led by Fabian Polnitzcky & with @sratzenboeck.bsky.social + @joaoalves.bsky.social: based on the ages of stars with infrared excess in Sco-Cen, it seems planet-forming disks last around twice as long as previous estimates suggest - giving twice as long for planets to form. 🔭☄️ #exoplanets

Question for the #exoplanets crowd: Does any one know where to find an updated version of this plot? I'm looking for the "standard" exoplanet mass vs. semi-major axis plot, but with an overlay of which planets have a spectroscopic measurement of their atmosphere wasp-planets.net/2020/09/29/w...

Which exoplanets do we have atmospheric spectra for?

Here’s an interesting plot created by Zafar Rustamkulov (@exoZafar), a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. He has added up all the exoplanets for which we have either transmission spectr…

wasp-planets.net

Enjoyed giving a UofA Origins talk on how protoplanetary disks evolve – featuring new results from ALMA and JWST. The recording is available here 👇 youtu.be/mdgGgnjVbb0 @uarizonalpl.bsky.social @stewardobservatory.bsky.social

Protoplanetary Disk Evolution in the ALMA–JWST Era (Ilaria Pascucci, UArizona/LPL)

YouTube video by Origins Seminars

youtu.be

Big congrats to Jennifer Burt, Xavier Dumusque, and Sam Halverson on finishing their epic (instant classic) Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics article "Precise Radial Velocities"! arxiv.org/abs/2511.01954 contains some great new graphics for talks on #exoplanets #EPRV #DopplerSpectroscopy

The NASA #Exoplanet Archive now has Gaia DR3 IDs! This should hopefully make your work and planning observations easier! exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu

w/ Oli Shorttle, @johannateske.bsky.social & Eliza Kempton we reviewed our current understanding and prospects for peaking on the inside of small #exoplanets in "Constraining exoplanet interiors using observations of their atmospheres": www.science.org/stoken/autho... & arxiv.org/abs/2510.08844 🔭🧪⚒️☄️

Keith Smith@drkeithsmith.bsky.social · 10mo ago

How can we tell what's inside an #exoplanet? @timlichtenberg.bsky.social et al review how a planet's atmosphere interacts with its interior. Atmospheric observations can distinguish between lava worlds, water worlds, temperate surfaces or supercritical interiors. ☄️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How do giant planets influence the type of #exoplanets that form in the habitable zone? A thread 1/🧵

Our paper on the JWST/MIRI observations of the epsilon Eridani system, led by Dr. Schuyler Wolff, were published today! This is the last of the Archetypical Disks in our MIRI Survey, after Fomalhaut and Vega. Just like for those disks, our MIRI images reveal an extended inner asteroid disk!