Jayne Birkby
@jaynebirkby.bsky.social
Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. I study the atmospheres of other worlds beyond the Solar system.
Earlier today, the discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket impacted on the Moon. As part of a coordinated observing campaign, our Very Large Telescope detected spectral lines of sodium and lithium gas in the impact plume lasting for 5-10 minutes after impact. 🔭 🧪 📷 ESO/C. Schmidt et al. 1/4
Strongly recommend Sarah Perry on the wonder of Jodrell 🔭 observer.co.uk/news/nationa...
Earth to Whitehall: the wonder and knowledge of Jodrell B...
The threatened closure of the world-famous radio telescope is symptomatic of a drive against learning and inquiry that is making us sicker as a society
observer.co.uk
This paper not only confirms a new exoplanet, but also helps explain why some M dwarfs host short-period giants while most don't—they may need a distant companion to drive the dramatic orbital migration. Every planet's story is shaped by distant gravitational tugs. 9/9 🔭 🧪 #exoplanet
Like all my colleagues I'm dismayed and angry at the cuts announced by STFC to UK astronomy, most prominently to Jodrell Bank and the associated radio astronomy facilities.
No! Jodrell Bank is such an important site for UK astronomy and has such history. I remember well my visits and experiments there as a Manchester undergraduate. These cuts are short-sighted and I hate them. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭☄️🧪
Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands
Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.
bbc.co.uk
Short-sighted, stupid cuts to the UKRI budget include shutting down Jodrell Bank, the icon of British astronomy. (Many other cuts too, including 20% to our brand new @vrubinobs.bsky.social). Interesting politically to shut down a major facility in...um..Manchester 🔭 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands
Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.
bbc.co.uk
Terrible news. Aside from learning more about the universe, we're not going to get much economic growth by cutting science funding. (If only we had a Prime Minister who was interested in supporting the north, and Manchester in particular, who could stop this.) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands
Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.
bbc.co.uk
It's going to be very hard for UKRI to stick to their mantra that there aren't any cuts at STFC, when the impact of "no cuts" includes closing the most iconic telescope in the country.
Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · last wk.I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands
Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.
bbc.co.uk
Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 3w ago“What will the Lovell Telescope discover/enable 20 yrs from now? I can’t tell you, and that’s the point. It will either be something extraordinary that none of us can yet predict, or we will defund it and leave Cheshire with a rusting monument to unfulfilled potential and discoveries never made.” 🔭🧪
This is how the cuts are going to kill us by the way - loads of small cuts to projects that on a spreadsheet don't stand out, but which quietly provide the capacity the UK community depends on across wavelengths and modes of observation.
HiPERCAM is such a cool instrument with so many applications across Astrophysics, its ring measurements of Quaoar are beautiful! Awesome science on a small budget. But now it’s a victim of STFC’s cuts to world-leading astrophysics in the UK. Gutting. #NAM2026
Chris Lintott @chrislintott.bsky.social · 2w ago...and just as I post that, Vik announces that the camera is at the end of its life due to cuts by STFC, who are not renewing the tiny operations grant for the team. A tragic loss of capability, saves only about £50k/year. #NAM2026
This article is very interesting from the standpoint of Eukaryotic evolution during the middle Proterozoic -- one of the key steps on the way to multicellular life. The main line of evidence still seems to be molecular clocks, so uncertain to my thinking.
Miguel Méndez Sandín@sandinmm.eurosky.social · 3w agoApparently the "boring billion" was actually exciting! We provide molecular evidence of complex Mesoproterozoic eukaryotic communities. So happy to see this out 🥳 Thanks to @phoebefossil.bsky.social , Hélène Morlon & @fburki.bsky.social for a lovely collab! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Very proud of my student Collin Cherubim for his discovery of an atmosphere on the habitable-zone exoplanet LHS 1140 b! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/s...
Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike Planet
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere, making it a lead contender in the search for life beyond our solar system.
nytimes.com
The purloined planet: Astronomers find a third planet around the nearby very young star Beta Pictoris… and it was hiding in plain sight for over a decade! [with amazing video of the planet's orbital motion] badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-third-pl... 🔭 🧪
A third planet for the nearby star Beta Pictoris!
The gas giant has been hiding in plain sight for over a decade
badastronomy.beehiiv.com
ICYMI Faintest #exoplanet ever imaged from Earth discovered after more than 10 years of hide-and-seek! Spotted using our VLT, the planet was later found to have been hiding in archival ESO observations spanning more than a decade. Video summary👇 🔭 🧪 1/2
Nice write up from @oxfordphysics.bsky.social on our contributions from Oxford to the beta Pic d discovery. Shout out to DPhil @luke-parker.bsky.social for some super VLT observations and Breakthrough Listen pre-doc Leyla Iskandarli for some deep data analysis! www.physics.ox.ac.uk/news/planet-...
Planet found after ten-year game of hide-and-seek
A planet that hid from astronomers for ten years has been found by a team including researchers from Oxford.
physics.ox.ac.uk
With the press release out, I'm delighted to share our work reporting the discovery of a 3rd planet in the beta Pictoris system! Say hello to beta Pic d - a gas giant with 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter that takes 91 years to orbit its host star, far longer than the 2 known planets in the system 🪐🔭
ESO@eso.org · 3w agoTen years of hide-and-seek! 🫣 Astronomers used our VLT to find a new #exoplanet orbiting the famous star Beta Pictoris — hiding in archival ESO observations spanning over a decade! And it's shyer than any exoplanet we've imaged before. 🔭 🧪 1/3 📷 ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.
Hide-and-seek champion award goes to the newly discovered beta Pic d! 🏆 Please welcome the newest member of the exoplanet zoo, and be kind, it’s a little shy, it’s been hiding in direct imaging data for over a decade!
ESO@eso.org · 3w agoTen years of hide-and-seek! 🫣 Astronomers used our VLT to find a new #exoplanet orbiting the famous star Beta Pictoris — hiding in archival ESO observations spanning over a decade! And it's shyer than any exoplanet we've imaged before. 🔭 🧪 1/3 📷 ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.
Hi #exoplanets folks, I’m attending the Expanding Horizons conference @eso.org this week (thinking about the facility post-ELT… terrifying, I know 😅). One thing that came up is that relatively few early-career astronomers submitted (co-authored) white papers for the process. next.eso.org 1/3
Expanding Horizons
next.eso.org
Day 3 of #HoRS3S is out of the gate with a gallop 🐎 w/ Luca Fossati discussing non local thermodynamic equilibrium in exoplanet atmospheres. "NLTE is horrible and fascinating at the same time" - every individual spectral line responds differently to NLTE, & is very important for He NIR triplet
It's been a fantastic week at #Exoplanets6, much excitement, the field has kicked up to an even higher gear since #Exoplanets5, some very cool results landing soon on the arXiv! Next up, exoplanets in high resolution at #HoRS3S. Giddy up y'all! 🐎🤠
Congratulations to Luke Parker (@luke-parker.bsky.social) on his talk “Tracing cloud condensation and formation histories across the giant planet population with observations of silicon chemistry” at #Exo6!
So, you know when a project you thought would be a small thing gets out of hand? Congratulations to all @zooniverse.bsky.social volunteers, and thanks to all the incredible team members who’ve worked on the platform all these years. 🔭 🧪
sam blickhan@snblickhan.bsky.social · last mo.I got so close to getting the screenshot 😂 @zooniverse.bsky.social but we’ve officially reached: 1 BILLION CLASSIFICATIONS!!!!!
🔭 Truly horrific how regular this has become, but please consider signing this letter. I did my undergrad at Sussex Physics & Astronomy and can honestly say I would not have finished my BSc (let alone subsequent PhD!) w/o the genuinely compassionate, supporting staff there. They do not deserve this.
Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · last mo.I hate that this — urgent pleas to save prestigious departments from drastic cuts — is becoming a regular occurrence. A program like this takes decades to build and a few strokes of a pen to destroy.
Very happy to share that I got awarded the IAU PhD Prize of Division F for my thesis on “Transmission spectroscopy of hot gas giant #exoplanets ” 🪐 I’m incredibly proud and happy, but also immensely grateful for all the support from supervisors, collaborators, friends and family through all this! ❤️
ESO@eso.org · last mo.Our congratulations to ESO fellows Maximilian Häberle & Bibiana Prinoth @bibianaprinoth.ch on receiving the 2025 IAU PhD Prize 👏 Assigned by each IAU Division, it acknowledges remarkable work carried out in the Division's subject area during the previous year. 1/4 🧵👇 🔭
Excited at our paper just out in PNAS. We used JWST to detect frozen deuterated water ("heavy water") on the moons of Uranus. There is **much more** on the moons than on Uranus itself, showing that Uranus and the moons formed from separate reservoirs of water. Fun lab work in the supplement, too.🔭🪐
Deuterated water and the formation of the satellites of Uranus | PNAS
The satellites of Uranus orbit in a low-eccentricity, equatorial plane that is tilted by 98° relative to the solar system—a geometry that mirrors U...
pnas.org
🔭 Keogram: The Sky in 2025 Image Credit & License: //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en">License: Cees Bassa (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) ap260621
