In work led by Alessandro Ruzza as part of the exoALMA project, we use the Simulation-Based Inference tool DBNets2.0 to estimate the masses of planets that would generate the observed substructure seen in dust continuum images of protoplanetary disks.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.13149
This might be subtitled “Skeletons from the N-body closet”! (shamelessly borrowing from Salmon and Warren). A reminder that even the “simplest” computational astrophysics problem has a great deal of depth and subtlety.
New paper! In work led by Matteo Cantiello @flatironinstitute.org we predict an instability strip for quasi-stars, which we argue is consistent with the observed variability properties of JWST’s Little Red Dots.
arxiv.org/abs/2512.17997
New paper, led by Jake Hassan, on the structure and evolution of quasi-stars: accreting black holes embedded in massive envelopes. This is a model for the growth of black hole seeds, and, maybe 🤞, for JWSTs “Little Red Dots”. Time will tell…
arxiv.org/abs/2510.18301
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Polka-dotted Stars II: Starspots and obliquities of Kepler-17 and Kepler-63. Sabina Sagynbayeva et. al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07130
With Navin Tsung and collaborators, we show how magnetic fields can effectively suppress gravitational instability and fragmentation in AGN accretion disks.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.21991
A timely paper for #HWO25: is it enough to find Earth-like planets around other nearby stars? No! We need their planetary system contexts. Does life on Earth depend on Jupiter?
@sabinastro.bsky.social led this nice analysis of HWO requirements to detect Earths + Jupiters.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.21443
Me and hubby discussing the new LIGO discovery of ginormous merging black holes.
Me to 3 yo: Nico, do you like black holes?
3 yo: No, I like YouTube.
Hubby: well, that's kinda a hybrid black/white hole: light comes out but no information 🤣
Happy #NerdyTuesday! 🧪
@philip-armitage.bsky.social
In work led by Alessandro Ruzza, we use a new simulation-based inference approach to estimate masses of disk embedded planets from ALMA data.
arxiv.org/abs/2506.11200
From today’s ethics training I learned that the threshold for a nominal gift in New York State is $15. The temptation to ask about jumbo jets was strong…
Thread on our simulation work on circumplanetary disks, led by @sabinastro.bsky.social with Alexandra Kuznetsova and Yan-Fei Jiang from @flatironinstitute.org. We’re working to understand when such disks form, and what their structure looks like as we zoom in closer to the planet.
You’re being generous: of course I didn’t even consider it overdue at all until a year after the deadline!
😂🤣
For most papers, reviewers are still responding pretty generously to my requests (thanks!).
No doubt though: “routine” results are not communicated as concisely as in the past. It’s become vastly easier to do many analyses, which is good but adds to the review work a lot.
If you too are experiencing mental health issues due to the ongoing shitshow, please DM me or Signal me at ziadadina.19, I am trying to build a community to help each other.
Y'all, please repost and help me out, this is serious stuff
New paper, led by the amazing @becastro.bsky.social (with Jeremy Smallwood, Andrew Winter, @astrohoss.bsky.social, and others). In which we try to understand the formation of the crazy-looking young planetary system IRAS04125... 🤔 🔭
arxiv.org/abs/2504.07182
Daniel Carrera, Linn Eriksson and collaborators study a “hybrid” mode of planetesimal formation, in which the growth of dust in vortices ultimately drives the system into the collapse regime of streaming instability parameter space.
arxiv.org/abs/2504.06332