The new ALMA online observing tool for submitting proposals is functioning as expected: crashing under lots of requests before the deadline (and it's only 2 days away!!). I guess there was no way to expect this high number of requests, right...? 🤦♂️
New personal best is "only" z~10.6 and z~10.3 for now... Waiting for two more sources getting to the ground and through the pipeline. Fingers crossed
Screenshot of scheduled targets for JWST programme 7208. 5 targets are scheduled in the evening of April 2, with 3 more on April 3-5.
Chances are that I will break my personal redshift record (z~9) tonight as 5 targets from my #JWST programme 7208 are observed.. Nothing too crazy but potentially z~12 so that would be nice! Exciting 😃
Last Friday I learned that my #JWSTCycle5 proposal was approved: 107 hours to do the first tomographic map of the IGM at the end of Reionisation - quite ambitious! 🥳
We will also collect >2000 PRISM spectra as fillers in COSMOS for legacy science. #extragalactic
www.stsci.edu/jwst/science...
So... #JWST Cycle 5 results will be announced this week, right? ... Right?
I can't take another week of waiting.
Cover of "Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics", which features an illustration of a 19-year-old Vera Rubin looking through a telescope over a backdrop of a first light image of spiral galaxies from the Rubin Observatory.
Happy International Women's Day!
Perfect time for me to (re)share our white paper on increasing the retention of women in professional astrophysics (really full of suggestions that broaden participation in academic science in general).
arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465
🧪🔭☄️👩🔬
it seems plausible that today we might get invitations to interviews (or not) for ERC Starting grants in the PE panels and I have rarely been so stressed..
David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪
The goal of the proposal is to target Lyman-alpha in z>5 galaxies pre-selected with JWST grism (Hb or Ha) to map the 3D progress of reionisation in the iconic COSMOS field. The COSMOS-3D team also got Subaru/PFS and Keck/MOSFIRE time for this - we are ~1 year away from some really cool stuff! 🔭
Yesterday I got news that my 84 hours proposal on VLT/FORS2 was approved! I've been on a high since then. 🤩 Beating the 11.5 oversubscription on UT1 is very satisfying..
they use dark gaps/pixels measurements (Davies+2026, Zhu+2022) that only provide (by design) upper limits (but at higher z) than LyA transmission. LyA opacity constraints on X_HI are really tight up to z<5.4 and then lower limits up to z~6 (Bosman+22, Fig. 14) - but not used here for some reason??
BUT the EW(LyA) conversion to x_hi from galaxies is very model-dependent, probably the most difficult probe of x_HI. Mostly I'm surprised that they (and other) ignore the Lyman-alpha forest constraints from quasars at z<6 - super robust and already in tension with some tanh et al. x_HI histories.
Generally I have always thought that using galaxy/quasar observations of x_HI as a prior to whatever reionisation histories used in the fitting of CMB data is a good thing. Using a tanh or else parametrisation of x_HI(z) when we have relatively good constraints at z<7.5 seems a waste
Toutes nos félicitations à Marta Volonteri, directrice de recherche @iap.fr, médaille d'argent du @cnrs.fr en 2022, qui vient d'être élue membre de l'@academiesciences.bsky.social ! @cnrs-insu.bsky.social @cnrs-paris.bsky.social @sorbonne-universite.fr
www.cnrs.fr/fr/personne/...
The application for the ESO Summer Research Programme 2026 has just opened!
It‘s a six week programme in Garching close to Munich where pre-Ph.D students can work on a hands-on project.
Working at @eso.org is a fabulous experience, so please help me spread the word ✨
🔗 eso.org/sci/meetings...
Yes or your supervisor does this for you. Sadly I hear the opposite is happening! Some editors are desperate and some relatively junior PhD students in my dept have been asked (and provided) reports..
ultimately this is about balancing your karma. I have anecdotal evidence of people in the field admitting they just flat out refuse any refereeing request because they are busy - but will then happily submit 2+ papers this year.
I mean, ok, you need to put some thinking in managing the fiat money. But unlike babysitting, everyone publishes regularly. This is equivalent to double-anonymous peer-review that is being implemented by ALMA/ESO/JWST to manage the surge in observing proposals but with a time-delay component
Happy to share my introductory review article "JWST provides a new view of cosmic dawn: latest developments in studies of early galaxies" has now been published in Contemporary Physics!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
arxiv.org/abs/2511.04843
how I wished we'd get paid! but apparently this is a non-starter...
This way the burden of refereeing is borne by those submitting, which sounds fair? Bonus: review tokens should be shareable. You can trade tokens with colleagues, help busy students, or reward underappreciated committee/service work with tokens because they map to actual working time! #academia
Finding referees seems to be increasingly difficult for journals, but people in my field submit *multiple* papers per year. Hot take: I propose a token currency where submitting a paper costs a token, and one review earns you one. You cannot submit yet another paper if your deficit is >N. #academia
a bit sceptical of these claims when the galaxies SED are only fitted with exponentially declining star-formation histories. At z~6 this is quite a bold claim that no other SFH are plausible/preferrable... most likely exp-declining SFH end up producing higher masses
A delayed announcement - the 2nd chapter of the Saas-Fee 2025 Lectures is now out on arXiv. Marta Volonteri did a fantastic job reviewing how we model the formation and growth of early massive black holes, and how JWST results are helping: arxiv.org/abs/2510.04599 (another 2 chapters will follow)
Quand notre ministre de tutelle nous insulte devant la représentation nationale. "Bande de nuls" "complètement à la ramasse".
Nous reprocher des taux de réussite faible à Horizon Europe et ERC, quand manquent les moyens pour assurer nos missions de service public. Surtout changez rien!👌
A series of wispy, blue strands emanate from the centre of the image, which is glowing orangey–red with a little pink. The background is FESTOONED with stars, all set against a black backdrop.
Another STUNNING image from JWST, this time of the Red Spider Nebula—the vast, wispy, gaseous remains of a now-dead star, the white dwarf core still glowing in the centre.
I can't assess whether the number and ionising output of the PopIII.1 / SMBH progenitors would be enough.. But I note that in the z=20 Flash model, the ionised fraction is 10% at z=14, which we could soon measure with Lyman-alpha/damping wings with JWST. The z=25 scenario is much harder to rule out!
In short, there is now a patch of the sky the size of the full moon for which we know the 3D structure of all luminous* galaxies at a time when the Universe was basically a toddler!
Usually confirming distant galaxies is hard and can only be done in very small fields. This field (COSMOS) is roughly the size of the *full moon* - pretty big by extragalactic standard. Also notable here is the use of a specific JWST instrument to confirm *all* galaxies in one go in that field.
Thanks! Here would be a jargon-free version: Thanks to #JWST we have precisely mapped the location of 237 galaxies so distant we see them as they are 0.5-0.8 Billion years after the Big Bang (we are a +13.7 billion years - their light travelled 13 billion years to reach us!).
