Prof. Abel Méndez
@profabelmendez.bsky.social
Planetary Astrobiologist and Director of the @PlanetaryHabLab. http://astrodon.social/@profabelmendez #exoplanets #astrobiology #habitability
August 15 marks the 49th anniversary of the Wow! Signal. Thanks to modern tools, we are learning more about this fascinating event than was possible for decades. The signal was real, it did not originate from terrestrial interference, and it came from space. phl.upr.edu/wow #AreciboWow
We've discovered two more long period transients! A new @pasajournal.bsky.social paper by Yuanming Wang and collabs introducing the VASTER pipeline running on ASKAP. As soon as we switched it on we started finding new things (star and LPT below) dx.doi.org/10.1017/pasa... #radioastro ☄️
The Flag of Earth has flown — and is flying — over many observatories. flagofearth.org
Home | The Flag of Earth
The Flag of Earth symbolizes the Earth, Sun, and Moon — a banner to fly when a project or activity benefits the whole Earth, not just one country.
flagofearth.org
New paper from Lorenzo Cesario 🔭 His third first-author paper, and he only finished his MSc this year. "Characterizing the oxidation state of rocky exoplanets with the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE)" Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28121 #Exoplanets #PlanetaryScience
If any exoplanet astronomers need an idea for an April Fools paper, an analysis of this atmosphere could be an... explosive read 🔭 #exoplanet
Jörg Hillebrand@gaghyogi49.bsky.social · 5d agoHere are the space shots that we get of (the original) Sol V and its two moons and the cool planetary graphic with all the basic facts about the planet, as seen in last week's #StarTrekSNW episode "The Griffin Incident".
Pluto’s Atmosphere: Hazy with signs of thinning - Planetary Science Institute www.psi.edu/blog/plutos-...
Pluto’s Atmosphere: Hazy with signs of thinning - Planetary Science Institute
Pluto is on an icy march away from the Sun. In the year 2114, it will turn back, but until then, its elliptical orbit will carry it to colder and darker parts
psi.edu
In May 2022, I discovered a planet candidate via Planet Hunters TESS on @zooniverse.bsky.social . Today it is officially confirmed as TOI-5628 Ab, and our paper published in ApJL. I am grateful to Dr. Tianjun Gan for inviting me as a co-author. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... 1/9 🔭 🧪 #exoplanet
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.” 🔭🧪
The Royal Astronomical Society is shocked and dismayed to hear that the UK's iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory is at risk of closure amid a slew of catastrophic budget cuts. Read our full statement here: ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...
#BookAlert Paul Murdin (2026) Exoplanets: The Search for Earth’s Twin. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/978-... 📚 The Astronomers’ Universe series attracts scientifically curious readers with a passion for astronomy and its related fields.
New paper on arXiv today! On the efficacy of using novel Bayesian machine learning to dispatch 'expensive' forward models of planetary evolution. This connects with #PLATO ageing and can help solve degeneracies in current static-retrieval approaches which treat #exoplanets as snapshots.
Constraining the lives and times of exoplanets through evolutionary Bayesian retrievals
Static retrieval frameworks are leading tools for interpreting exoplanet observations, yet time-independent modelling leaves them prone to degeneracy and unable to resolve exoplanets' histories. The c...
arxiv.org
The Lunar farside, which is shielded from Earth's electromagnetic radiation, is a pristine and unmatched environment where future sensitive #RadioAstronomy can take place. But as commercial and political access to the Moon grows, so too does the risk of preserving this important radio heritage 🔭
Gonna do something a bit scary on Monday 🙃 I‘ll be talking about magnetic fields on #exoplanets in German 🥺
Haus der Astronomie@hausderastronomie.bsky.social · 2w agoDas Magnetfeld der Erde ist wie ein Schutzschild, das des Jupiter hingegen erzeugt messbare Radiostrahlung. Und wie schaut es mit Magnetfeldern bei extrasolaren Planeten aus? @bibianaprinoth.ch verrät es uns am Montag bei Astro & Co - wie immer um 19 Uhr live 🔭 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eQE...
Michelle Kunimoto pointing out the importance of *automated* vetting of #exoplanet candidates. Manual inspection introduces uncharacherizable biases! #Sagan2026
#Astronomy News You May Have Missed ⤵️ VLBA Maps Turbulent “Weather” in the Milky Way Decade of radio observations of distant quasar TXS 2005+403 reveals first direct VLBI signature of interstellar turbulence, sharpening tools for future black hole imaging #RadioAstronomy #NRAO #VLBA
VLBA Maps Turbulent “Weather” in the Milky Way - National Radio Astronomy Observatory
The latest news from the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
public.nrao.edu
Delighted that (new Dr!) Isaac Radley’s #JWST, #ALMA and #VLA survey of Ophiuchus is now on arXiv. By combining IR, mm and cm observations he traces disks, dust and outflows across the earliest stages of star formation. arxiv.org/abs/2607.15468 🔭 #starformation #planetformation #radioastronomy
You always discover something when you have a new instrument with higher sensitivity - Mahapatra+ on Planet-wide, Concentric Density Waves in Venus’s Upper Atmosphere Revealed through Polarimetry? in which you can see a bullseye on the day-lit side of our sister planet! #exoplanets #astrodon
What I also like about this discovery is that it was driven partly by theoretical predictions about the existence of He-planets, which made them look in the first place. Models and observations working together in harmony! #exoplanets
Robin Wordsworth@rdword.bsky.social · 3w agoVery 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...
Using the NSF Very Large Array, astronomers detected polarized light from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow + Faraday rotation in a GRB (a phenomenon in which magnetic fields cause the polarization of light to twist as it travels through space) for the first time at radio wavelengths! #RadioAstro
Magnetic Fingerprint of a Cosmic Explosion for the First Time
NSF VLA radio telescope reveals polarized light and a powerful magnetic environment in a gamma-ray burst afterglow
bit.ly
Known as Beta Pictoris d, it is the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth. This is a major feat, as direct imaging only works for #exoplanets bright enough to show up next to their much brighter host stars. How does the newcomer compare to its siblings? 🔭 🧪 2/3
New paper led by Lorenzo Cesario, his second first-author paper from his MSc 🌍 Some close-in super-Earths puff their atmospheres back up late in life instead of only shrinking. We call it reflation. Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13793 #Exoplanets #PlanetaryScience
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
Observing an atmosphere on a rocky #exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone: Cherubim et al. use transit spectroscopy to identify helium absorption by LHS 1140b. The results indicate a helium-dominated atmosphere that is undergoing transient escape. ☄️🔭🧪 #Exo6 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
One month until the 49th anniversary of the most famous signal ever detected during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. phl.upr.edu/wow/bigear #AreciboWow
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
Sak Tahn Waax – Maya Astronomer and Mathematician, c. AD 781
@cosmos4u.bsky.social · 3w agoThe identification and work of an eighth-century Maya mathematician: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... -> Scrawled signature names a Maya astronomer for the first time: www.science.org/content/arti... - the autograph accompanies formulas devised to sync calendars with planetary movement.
We've discovered another long period transient with ASKAP! Source #15 in this small but growing population. It repeats every 36 minutes, but despite many observations (see plot) we're not sure what it is. New paper by Joshua Pritchard: doi.org/10.1017/pasa... #radioastro
There's some super neat radio astronomy work being done in Canada, complementing CHIME. This is CHORD: Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector. 512 x 6m dishes with two outlier stations (64 dishes each). arxiv.org/abs/2607.09374 #RadioAstronomy 📡🔭
