🗣️ Life update: with everything signed, I can finally announce that I will soon start a new permanent (!) role doing space research for the Swedish government! 🚀🔭 I’ll focus on space safety & policy but will also continue doing exoplanet projects (so, not quite leaving academia!) and I’m SO excited 🥹
A recommended read by Hiranya Peiris:
"[we] had a quality problem long before LLMs...publish or perish, citation metrics as proxy for impact, volume as proxy for productivity... have been producing incremental, poorly checked, & sometimes wrong papers for decades"🧪🔭⚛️
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
“Fly” through Hubble's view of the Trifid Nebula, part of its anniversary package! 🥳 The video “floats” over the ridges of gas and dust and moves up toward Herbig-Haro 399, at the top of a brown cloud that resembles a head with horns. 🔭
#JournoRequest I am working on a story for @iflscience.com on the NASA cuts in Trump's budget proposal 🔭🧪
Is your mission directly affected, or will your research be affected if a mission is ended or cancelled? I want to hear from you; we will keep you anonymous.
DM me or signal: DrCarpineti.59
The more I learn about neutrinos, the more I realize they are my gender identity and expression.
Before installing the detector it's essential to take some time out and see the gorgeous spectrum with your own eyes. It's impossible to capture what the eye sees but this photo gives you an idea ...
Congratulations Doctor!!!!! 🥳🥳🥳
With this agreement ESA and Canada are together unlocking new opportunities to advance critical technologies, strengthen our industrial ecosystems and reinforce our collective capabilities.
www.esa.int/About_Us/Cor...
Intriguing hint of CO2 in my favorite exoplanet GJ 1214b. It seems the detection can be reconciled with other measurements with a bit of effort, but at least it's a signal to not give up hope of on this little planet.
Nortmann+ arxiv.org/abs/2604.15292
🧪🔭 #exoplanets
Is Mercury not a planet either now? Neat @aas.org research note showing that solar effects are actually more efficient at clearing Mercury's orbit iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Discovery Of A Universal Enzyme That Makes All Four Nucleotide Building Blocks Of Life
astrobiology.com/2026/04/disc... #astrobiology #genomics #originoflife
A wide view of the Martian surface seen from above. The landscape is split into two contrasting halves: the left side is lighter, sandy beige with faint ridges and cracks, while the right side is darker, reddish-brown and more heavily cratered. The boundary between the two regions is uneven and gradual, creating a striking colour contrast across the scene.
Mars Express has captured a blanket of dark ash creeping across the Red Planet.
It has spread hundreds of kilometres in less than 50 years.
🔭 🧪
#planetsci
1/4
🧪 Wow! A huge Terra Hunting Experiment milestone has been reached from La Palma (Canary Islands): our incredible HARPS3 spectrograph will soon be ready to start hunting for Earth-like #exoplanets around Sun-like stars!
Follow @terrahunting.bsky.social below for updates ⬇️ Next stop: first light! ☀️🌍🔭
A black square labeled “29 Cyg” at upper right. In the middle, a white star symbol is surrounded by a small blue trapezoid that widens from upper left to lower right of the star. The is star labeled with a capital A. The trapezoid indicates where the star’s light has been blocked by a coronagraph. To the star’s left beyond the blue trapezoid at 8 o’clock is a fuzzy white blob labeled with a lower-case b.
Weighing in at 15 times the mass of Jupiter, super-chonky 29 Cygni b is massive enough that it could be considered a brown dwarf. However, new data from #NASAWebb shows that it formed like a planet, not like a star: https://news.stsci.edu/4v59Ljj 🔭
Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to directly image 29 Cygni b, which weighs 15 times Jupiter. They found evidence for heavy chemical elements like carbon and oxygen, which strongly suggests it formed like a planet by accretion within a protoplanetary disk, and not like a star through fragmentation. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) was used in its coronagraphic mode, in which a wedge (indicated by the blue box) is used to block the light of the host star (labeled A and marked with a star symbol) to reveal the planet. This image combines light from three filters between 4 and 5 microns. The planet is brightest in the blue filter, then green, then red, so it appears as an off-white dot in the color composite. If carbon dioxide weren’t present, the planet would appear noticeably redder. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to 4.6 micron light.
🔭🪐 my team took this image of 29 Cygni b, a super giant planet 130 light years from us, with JWST. we found some interesting clues that suggest that this planet (~15x the mass of Jupiter) accreted more than 100 times the mass of the Earth in carbon- and oxygen-rich material during its formation
Thirty six percent of the way but doing more than just cruising away! Since @esa.int 's Juice mission launched #onthisday in 2023, it has already hit incredible milestones!
🌍🌖 A pioneering Lunar–Earth flyby
☀️🟠 A Venus flyby
💫📸 An unprecedented 3I/ATLAS observation campaign
Happy launch-versary!🚀
It gets weirder. The dinosaurs saw complete solar eclipses but the moon was *bigger* (closer) so not a neat match as we get now.
In the future (far far away) the eclipses will only be annular. The moon is still moving away (by cm/year). No more total eclipses!
Another key distinction between comet people and asteroid people is if you ask an asteroid person if DART made Didymos into a comet they'll laugh and say "Maybe? Probably not, though" and comet people will say "ABSOLUTELY NOT WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU TO EVEN SAY THAT"
A long red and blue nebula stretching diagonally across the center, surrounded by bright stars
A celestial witch’s broom?
The oddly shaped nebula NGC 2736 pictured in this image is part of the remnant left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11 000 years ago.
Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1236/
🔭
📷 ESO
I wrote this one up for my newsletter! It is indeed such a fun study.
Just in case anyone is paywalled from Sci Am but still wants a fun lil breakdown of the paper:
Are you an astronomy graduate student who’s interested in science communication? Apply for the AAS Media Fellowship by June 26! aasnova.org/2026/04/08/a... 🔭 @aas.org
Are you a specialist in land surface climate research?
@esa.int is hiring a Climate Applications Scientist to lead Earth observation projects on terrestrial carbon and water cycles in support of global climate policy.
📍ECSAT in Harwell, UK
📅Deadline: 21 April 2026
Learn more here:
My latest story is up! The components required for DNA and RNA are all present on asteroid Ryugu, which lends strong support to the hypothesis that the raw ingredients for life were present before the Sun even formed. A very fun and fascinating tale!
The plot thickens for C/O as a planet formation discriminator…two papers on the arXiv today featuring Carnegie folks! Paper one by Diogo Souto, @pascucci.bsky.social, Katia Cunha, & Shubham Kanodia examines the age old question, does star=disk?
arxiv.org/abs/2604.05221
I am begging you: take a couple minutes and look at the images from yesterday’s lunar flyby. They are absolutely incredible www.nasa.gov/gallery/luna...
Lunar orb showing mostly the far side which has many more craters and less dark patches
Latest #ArtemisII Moon pic 🌕
LOOK HOW DIFFERENT THE FAR SIDE IS!
so unfamiliar!
Good day to remind everyone that we must fight to preserve the radio heritage / quietness of this region, it’s the only place shielded from Earth’s EM radiation.
I hope there are radio telescope there one day! 📡
🔭
That's home. That's us.
This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew.
Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right.
Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman
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13:00 UTC = 15:00 CEST = 09:00 EDT = 06:00 PDT = 22:00 JST
If you haven't signed up to our mailing list to access the Zoom-link, you can also watch it live on our YouTube channel 🔭☄️🧪 Livestream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlQw...
Venn diagrams of detection significance of CO, H2S, non-gray clouds, and non-isothermal temperatures using combinations of NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI (and WFC3 as a replacement of NIRISS).
Ooo I quite like these plots, showing how well you detect things in an exoplanet (HAT-P-12b) spectrum with JWST (and HST) using combinations of instruments.
Heinke+ arxiv.org/abs/2604.01219
🧪🔭 #exoplanets
