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

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...

'Missed opportunity': Astronomers lament loss of telescope partnership The Artemis II mission used space technology developed in Australia, but experts fear the axing of a multimillion-dollar telescope partnership may stifle innovation and astronomy.

A few weeks back the Australian Govt. decided to pull out of a partnership we had with the ESO, which gave Aussie astronomers access to important, global-class infrastructure (+ opportunities!) that we don't have here.

This is incredibly short-sighted and will have broader impacts outside of astro.

Looking out into the distance at sunset. A large dish antenna radio telescope is silhouetted, along with some trees. In the sky hangs a thin crescent moon, with Earth shine illuminating the larger lunar disc.

Murriyang + Luna 😍

📸 Alex Cherney / CSIRO

TLI! Translunar injection complete, Artemis II apogee now over 400,000 km; they're heading to the Moon.

The SLS rocket with the Artemis II Orion spacecraft and its European Service Module stands ready on the launchpad

ESA photographer Stephane Corvaja's remote camera set up ready for launch! Artemis II rocket in background backed by blue sky.

✅ #Artemis II update: countdown has started for launch. Liftoff of the crewed lunar mission is scheduled for 1 April 23:24 BST/00:24 CEST 2 April. NASA reports currently 80% chance of favourable weather conditions (pics: NASA & ESA/S.Corvaja)

See go.nasa.gov/4sL4j3x @exploration.esa.int

#NoKings #Toledo #Ohio

NASA astronaut shares photo of weird, purple, egg-shaped object with 'tentacles' on the ISS. But the truth is much more terrestrial | BBC Sky at Night Magazine NASA astronaut and skilled photographer Don Pettit shared a photo of a purple potato he flew on the International Space Station.

Not now, weird purple space alien egg (potato) … www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/nasa-as...

#ComingSoon: Artemis II next launch opportunities open from 1 April 23:24 BST/2 April 00:24 CEST, our European Service Module powering NASA’s Orion spacecraft around the Moon! Stay tuned. 🚀

Galaxy Forensics with A/Prof Dr Elisabete da Cunha | Astrophiz #230 - Astrophiz: The Astronomy and Astrophysics Podcast Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/elisabete230v Summary:“Galaxy Forensics and Evolution”Uncover the hidden histories of the universe in this Astrophiz episode ‘Galaxy Forensics‘, where we join ...

New Astrophiz! Talking "Galaxy Forensics" with Dr. Elisabete da Cunha.

Learn how astronomers use the MAGPHYS code to reconstruct the hidden early Universe.
It's like CSI, but for the early Universe. 🔭

Read & Listen: astrophiz.com/2026/03/18/g...

#Astrophysics #SpaceScience #Astronomy

Cover page> The Theory of Interstellar Trade Paul Krugman, July 1978. *Assistant Professor, Yale University. This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-Elect William Proxmire.

Cris Moore (SFI) directed me to Paul Krugman's delightful "The Theory of Interstellar Trade".

"This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

Don't miss the funding declaration.

www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/in...

A Table showing the number of positions posted at AAS job-registed for various categories.

Looking at the AAS jobregister lately, it seemed to me that there are less positions available in all categories than in previous years. Wanting to quantify, I used the wayback machine to check on the number of postings in the January-March window and it is quite depressing.

The SLS rocket for the Artemis II mision rolling out to its launchpad earlier this year. ESA's European Service Module is contained within the top part of the orange rocket, with a blue sky.

#Artemis II update 🚀
⏰ April launch opportunities in Central European Summer Time (CEST)

🗓️ 2 Apr — 00:24
🗓️ 3 Apr — 01:22
🗓️ 4 Apr — 02:00
🗓️ 5 Apr — 02:53
🗓️ 6 Apr — 03:40
🗓️ 7 Apr — 04:36

Set those alarms Europe ☕
Night owls 🦉 and very early birds 🐦, this one's for you 🌕

This whole thread 🤣

LinkedIn?! 👀

An image of the radio galaxy Fornax A and its surroundings at 300 MHz.

We have recently published the 300-MHz component of the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA survey (GLEAM-300), with 338k sources covering the sky up to declination +40 deg, with ~120" angular resolution and ~9 mJy/beam noise. The description paper is published via PASA: doi.org/10.1017/pasa....

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

Maybe this is how we should keep speakers on time at astronomy conferences …

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Why do we do astrophysics? At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...

Astronomers: highly recommend this thoughtful opinion piece by @hogg.bsky.social on how to think about our field in light of the development of large language models. whether you agree with him or not it’s vital to discuss the principles behind our science. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181

This is what the most distant confirmed galaxy looks like. The light we're receiving was emitted when the Universe was ~15x smaller in linear size than today, and right now it's ~30 billion light-years away from us. The light was emitted when the Universe was <300 million years old. Pretty amazing!

Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics – Physics World Mats Larsson and Ramon Wyss reveal why Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel prize

Many people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️
physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...

NASA Conducts Artemis II Fuel Test, Eyes March for Launch Opportunity   - NASA NASA concluded a wet dress rehearsal for the agency’s Artemis II test flight early Tuesday morning, successfully loading cryogenic propellant into the SLS

#ArtemisII update: NASA completed the wet dress rehearsal for Artemis II early this morning. To allow teams to review data and conduct a second wet dress rehearsal, NASA will now target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the mission. @exploration.esa.int

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. 😳

Aurora above the Dwingeloo radio telescope

Great aurora visible in Dwingeloo yesterday!

NASA’s Artemis II mission will be humankind’s long-awaited return to the moon NASA on Friday laid out the timeline for Artemis II, humanity’s first crewed mission to the moon in more than fifty years

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Artemis II—humankind's first crewed voyage to the moon in more than a half-century—is at last almost ready to launch, and NASA revealed some new details about the mission in a press conference earlier today. Check it out!

www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...

NASA is planning on rolling out the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at #NASAKennedy no earlier than 17 January. The 6.4 km journey will take up to 12 hours.

Discovery Projects are now a complete joke:

EoIs were due 12 Dec last year. Full apps are due 22 April this year. Results won't be out until next year: 15 Jan – 15 Apr 2027.

That’s up to 16 MONTHS!

The SKA-Mid telescope is now officially a working interferometer! With both SKA-Low and SKA-Mid fringing now, we are entering a very exciting period when the telescopes undergo extensive commissioning and science verification. See www.skao.int/en/news/693/... for more information.

The Lovell radio telescope with snow on the ground and trees as the sun sets

The end of a snowy day at Jodrell Bank Observatory with a view of the Sun setting behind the Lovell Telescope.

@jodrellbank.bsky.social @officialuom.bsky.social
@uomscieng.bsky.social