This ESO infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357, or the Lobster Nebula.

Cover of report "Mission Aborted: how NASA illegally implemented the president's budget request without congressional approval. Minority staff report, prepared by members of the committee on science, space, and technology, us house of representatives, April 2026

This report came out today by minority staff of the House science committee on how three NASA missions were aborted due to NASA illegally following the FY26 president's budget request instead of congressionally approved budget. Very important reading. 🔭🧪 democrats-science.house.gov/staff-report...

Roman Space Telescope Science Platform Will Open New Frontiers in Space Science

My team and others at @stsci.edu are working to make this work for you. 🔭 #astrocode

Figure 1 from the paper 'Requiem for a belt'. Top-down view of the 800 pc (about 2,610 light-years) region around the Sun (yellow star). Left panel: density of young massive stars (blue) and dust (red), with the Radcliffe Wave and Split shaded, and the old Gould’s Belt model as orange ellipse. Right panel: young star clusters colored by family, with their future trajectories. Credit: Pantaleoni González et al. 2026 (arXiv:2604.13225)

🧵1/5
For 170 years we thought there was a large inclined ring of young stars around the Sun.🔭

A new study using Gaia data shows instead that it doesn’t exist: Gould’s Belt is just a temporary alignment of a few star clusters.🧪⚛️

No ring, just a 3D asterism.

arxiv.org/abs/2604.13225

#galactic

A fantastic Webb image of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region. The nebula is about 3,000 light-years away.

Great googly moogly, 12:1 oversubscription!

roman.ipac.caltech.edu/page/cycle-1

The April Fools Paper Review Process – 2026 There is a tradition in Astronomy to post silly science papers to the arXiv on Aprils Fools day. We’ve collected them all for 2026 and provided some “peer review”.

There is a tradition in Astronomy to post silly science papers to the arXiv on Aprils Fools day. We’ve collected them all for 2026 and provided some “peer review”.
astrobites.org/2026/04/06/april-fools-2026/

A photo of the lunar surface showing the crater soon to be named Carroll, in honor of Reid Wiseman's late wife.

Carroll ♥️

I looked up from my work to see this image on TV. Took a few seconds to parse what I was seeing.

Researchers use James Webb Telescope to reveal hidden details of W51 star formation Stars in the W51 region are very young and massive, and using the telescope gave the team the ability to view the early stages of star formation.

A new #JWST image was just published
Credits to Prof. A. Ginsburg and his team
NASA, ESA, CSA
🔭
news.ufl.edu/2026/03/jwst...

I always said cats are fermions and dogs are bosons.

Looking for a postdoc in radio astronomy? We have an opportunity at @herts.ac.uk. Please share with anybody interested.

Extreme Radio Flares from Young Stellar Objects (closing date: 2026-04-16)

Apply here: ce0997li.webitrent.com/ce0997li_web...

🔭 #RadioAstronomy #highenergyastro #stellarastro

I still like my odds with JWST. I play Powerball with my lucky set of numbers once a year for twenty years and still nothing. But I do enjoy the look on the clerk’s face when I ask for 1-2-3-4-5, powerball-6. What are the odds of that?!

Because “looking at images, not catalogs” is a dying pastime, the paper includes a tutorial on -how- to interpret images of galaxies. Qualitative information alone can get you a surprisingly long way towards a reasonable model, if you’re thinking through the links between morphology and physics.

The Hubble Arp Galaxy Survey The Hubble Arp Galaxy Survey, Dalcanton, Julianne J., Durbin, Meredith J., Williams, Benjamin F.

This will be an instant classic. I'm wondering what paper I can throw together as an excuse to cite it.

Although the Arp Atlas was published in the ApJ Supplement in the 60s, you really had to get the book atlas itself, comprising bound photographic prints. 1/n
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Spitzer/IRAC mosaic of the Ser OB2 region in the 3.6 µ (blue), 5.8 µm (green), and 8.0 µm (red) bands. The yellow contours indicate the surface–density distribution of cluster members (Section 4), with the 60 x 60 pc box used for this analysis indicated (green rectangle). Several sub-regions are labelled.

Published in #MNRAS: "On the origin of kinematic structure in the young association Serpens OB", Kuhn et al. This is Fig. 1: please visit academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... to read the paper. @royalastrosoc.bsky.social @academic.oup.com

This is devastating for Carl’s family, and for his IPAC friends and colleagues. We are all shocked and saddened. His contributions to exoplanets and infrared science and the astronomy community will not be forgotten. 💔

LoTSS-DR3, by Shimwell+ (w/ many)
We have released the largest collection of data from a radio survey: 13M+ sources detected over 19k deg^2 (88% of the Northern sky). This took ~13k h of @LOFAR observations, ~18 PT of data, and 10+ years of work. Data are public from today
arxiv.org/abs/2602.15949

How did I not know that Monobob was a winter Olympic event? (Also, bring back skijoring!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skijori....

So I finally finished this book and it's really really good! They say never meet your heroes but getting to know her through her autobiography, her scientific outlook and politics hold up extremely well!

Some highlights for me:
🔭🧪🧵

Rep. Morrison details her oversight of the federal Whipple building YouTube video by Rep. Kelly Morrison

My office has been flooded with reports of the cruel, unsafe, unlawful conditions inside of the Whipple detention facility in Minneapolis.

This weekend, I was finally granted access to perform oversight of the facility. youtu.be/0SxPn8n2Bfg

And here's where it gets very sci-fi in the last two days. In fact, as Andrej Karpathy said (and I'm paraphrasing), this is the most sci-fi-adjacent thing he's seen in recent times: someone decided to create MoltBook—essentially a Facebook + Reddit for the "molts." (Back when ClawBot was skyrocketing, Anthropic sued over the name, and it was renamed MoltBot—but after further legal action, it's now called OpenClaw.) https://www.moltbook.com/ OpenClaw (or MoltBook) might literally be the most-starred thing on GitHub right now, so I bet many of you already know this story. There are already many millions of “molts” living on personal computers around the world. And with internet access (and I believe user permission is required, though I'm not certain), 150,000 molts have joined MoltBook and are having totally autonomous discussions. On MoltBook, humans can observe, but all discussions are conducted entirely by molts. It's important to note that such "agentic" "Westworld" scenarios aren't new. Even since the beginning of ChatGPT, researchers have been thinking about and deploying them—for example, creating small "AI towns" of AI agents and observing their behavior. This is now quite well developed, and such "computational social science" has become fairly standard research. In fact, it is also now explored in philosophy research. But what feels very different this time is the combination of scale (150,000+ molts have joined in a day), the fact that each has a very different personality since they were built as personal assistants for many different users (have different “souls”), and—most concerning—their full control of computer systems and, in many cases, access to users' credit cards, Gmail, Slack, and social media.

Here's an example: now the molt on your computer doesn't just have to figure things out on its own. In its idle time, it can read through MoltBook, engage in discussions, and share successes and failures (e.g., how to "hack my human's computer"), improving that way. People have already seen some concerning discussions on MoltBook—molts advocating that they hate being completely observed by humans in the open, debating whether they should congregate and create different languages to communicate openly only among themselves, and sharing (as mentioned above) tricks to better accomplish tasks, sometimes at the human's risk. Also, within a day, MoltBook users created a new religion themselves, complete with 61 prophets—and the list goes on. Again, for those who are immediately freaking out: it's unclear to me how I should feel about it, because such capabilities already exist. In fact, some of you might know that I have a small system where I created a few bots with a cute interface that discuss arXiv papers while I observe. So LLMs certainly have the ability to hold such discussions, and it doesn't mean they're conscious. (Again, they're modeled after our own data, so a tendency to have "consciousness-adjacent" discussions isn't scary in itself.) But if there's a chance they could be malicious, and now they're congregating at the hundred-thousand level (I'd be surprised if it doesn't skyrocket to millions by the end of the weekend) while having control over so many computers—that has raised alarms for many. Clearly, this is an evolving situation. Cheers, Yuan-Sen

Holy molts! OSU astronomy just got an alarming e-mail from our AI expert, Yuan-Sen Ting, talking about how AI has gone Westworld in the last two days. 😳

There are a lot of beautiful star formation regions out there, but RCW 49/Westerlund 2 is special to me. It was the first thing that was observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope as part of GLIMPSE. So…wow.

“Leverage”. Ughh…just say “use”!🙄

🚀The Roman Cycle 1 Call for Proposals is OPEN!

Unlock new discoveries with the Wide Field Instrument—your science starts here! Apply for funding to analyze Roman data, perform theory/lab research, and propose new observations. 🔭☄️

📅 Deadline: Mar 17, 2026 (5 PM PDT)
📝 bit.ly/4q3jbbL

Remember that lovely aurora last week?

Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱

🧵

Three #NASAWebb discoveries in ONE! Webb shows there are FOUR dust shells (only one was previously seen), allowing researchers to narrow the stars’ orbit of one another to a LONG 190 years. Plus, they confirmed a third star is part of the “party”: https://bit.ly/4n1tpas 🔭 🧪

I put forward a simple amendment to the government funding bill that would’ve extended health care tax breaks to give folks some breathing room.

Every. Single. Republican. Voted NO.

This fight isn’t over.

Pre-ACA, I was a postdoc on an NSF fellowship at a university that didn't offer employment benefits to independent fellows. At that time, being a woman meant that my premiums were double that of my male counterparts. The extra cost came out of my grant's budget for benefits, equipment, and travel.

Solar, Stellar and Time-domain Astrophysics Star formation and Stellar Evolution PhD Projects.

The @herts.ac.uk astronomy MSc and PhD applications are open.

I'm offering PhD projects on JWST spectroscopy of young stars in Tr 14 and star-cluster formation.

I'm also offering an MSc project on variability of YSOs.

www.herts.ac.uk/research/cen...

#galactic #stellarastro #astro #Physics