Ouch ...

This is really good.

congratulations, Sabina!

A car on a road following very closely behind an open bed truck with a couple of dozen large pine tree trunks stacked up at an angle, looking like they are just aching to slide off and kill people who are in a car following very closely behind.

I've seen enough horror movies to know this is a really bad idea

There are similar findings from direct imaging: e.g. the discovery paper for HIP 99770 b (29 Cyg b), a similar recent system, & a recent demographics study

See here
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023Sci....

here
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026AJ.....

and here
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXi...

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

Not sure about 'elite' coffee culture. But for every day experience, I have a hard time believing that Starbucks is anywhere close to beating coffee/espresso before getting on the Paris metro ...

ouch

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON IM GONNA CRYYY 😭😭😭

We are living in the Kelvin timeline, aren't we? Or the one where Biff stole the Sports Almanac?

sigh, "disappointment abounds ..."

We all know that the true master of "romance of style" is John David Jackson ...

Our Assistant or Associate Professor of Instruction position (emph on cosmology and/or relativity) is now up on the AAS Jobs Register

aas.org/jobregister/...

Note the short turnaround for submitting an application (Apr 30!).

Discovery of a Low-Mass Companion to the Accelerating Star HIP 53005 with Strongly Conflicting Mass Estimates We present the discovery of a low-mass companion located at $ρ$ $\sim$ 0\farcs{}85 ($r_{\rm proj} \approx 62~au$) from the early-type 1.2 Gyr-old star HIP 53005 using direct imaging data from the Suba...

Accelerating star surveys with SCExAO strike again! This time a work led by Uyama-san identifying a potential GJ229B-like companion (or something else strange going on)

arxiv.org/abs/2604.03767

Our dept at UTSA invites applicants for a full-time, fixed-term Assistant/Associate Professor of Instruction position. This is a teaching position involving undergraduate courses in astronomy and/or physics, w/ emphasis on Cosmology and Relativity courses.
bit.ly/4sjCi1V

oh good God ...

The VLT/ERIS grating vector Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph We describe the design, laboratory manufacture, and on-sky testing of the grating vector apodizing phase plate (gvAPP) coronagraph for the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) on the Ver...

For all the coronagraph fans out there: I'm pleased to share our paper (led by @mattkenworthy.bsky.social) on the design & performance of the Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph for the ERIS instrument at the Very Large Telescope + our recommendations for using it to study exoplanets & brown dwarfs 🪐🔭

A telescopic image of a flat, inclined fuzzy disc with bright rings and dark gaps, all concentric. There is a small blob in one of those gaps. An inset that zooms in on the centre of the disc shows a second blob in another gap.

A new solar system in the making?

For the second time ever, two planets have been directly observed forming around a host star. Our VLT and VLTI have helped astronomers confirm the presence of a second gas giant orbiting the star WISPIT 2. 

More: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2604/

🔭 🧪

Pro tip: when writing a proposal, write an introduction that, you know,*introduces* the topic to a reviewer who might not be thinking of your specialty every waking hour of their day.

A good introduction, that also shows that you know what others are doing on the problem, really helps a proposal.

Steward teams are building instruments for Lazuli — a new space telescope launching by 2029 as part of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Our adaptive optics will image giant exoplanets nearly a billion times dimmer than their host stars! bit.ly/4dkXYH1

congrats!

Cold giant discoveries from a joint radial-velocity and astrometry framework The population of long-period giant planets shapes planetary system architectures and formation pathways, but these cold Jupiters remain relatively unexplored. Radial velocity (RV) surveys lose sensit...

Here come the cold giants! A combination of RV and astrometry reveals several "Jupiter analogues", among them one planet (around HIP 39330, a G5V star, ca. 100 ly away) that matches Jupiter quite nicely: a=5.05 au, e=0.078, M=1.67 M_jup. If only we could quickly check for terrestrial planets inside!

Happy Blacker Friday (er, Lotz Friday?) ...

... to those who celebrate (or mourn, depending on your proposal outcome?).

indeed

This is half the reason why I review papers.

NASA should leave Winnie alone ...

between this and Jonathan Gagne's MOCA catalog, I have a lot of exploring to do ...

LOL

I'm just going to be happy that soon I won't have see "Ice Barbie"'s face talking about Real IDs while going through security at the San Antonio Intl Airport.

At least he hasn't k**led any puppies or goats that we know of ...