Photo of Earth seen from the Orion spacecraft, with green aurora to the upper right and lower left and bright white zodiacal light at the bottom right. The Earth is lit by moonshine, and Africa can be seen on the left. Clouds swirls throughout the circle.

#PPOD: Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn. There are two auroras (top right/bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun. Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman 🧪 🔭

These pictures are two years apart, yet the cat still chills in the same spot at a popular tourist attraction. It’s just like a PhD student: in the same place, doing the same thing for years. 🐱

Black-and-white portrait photograph of Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley (1941–1981), the brilliant New Zealand-born astronomer and cosmologist who revolutionized our understanding of galaxy evolution. She is shown in a close-up headshot against a plain, softly lit gray background, smiling warmly and just past the camera with an intelligent, approachable, and joyful expression. Tinsley has short, wavy dark hair styled in soft curls that frame her face, and she wears earrings with round pearl or gem accents. Her eyes are bright and engaging, and her expression radiates quiet confidence and enthusiasm, capturing her during her groundbreaking career in the 1960s or early 1970s when she developed influential models of stellar populations and demonstrated that galaxies evolve significantly over cosmic time.

Beatrice Tinsley was born #OTD in 1941.

British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist, and the first female professor of #astronomy at Yale University, whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow, and die. #WomenInSTEM (1/2)

Did the Kdrama gods just bless me?

Yes, it works now. Thank you! 😃

👎

My first citation!!!😃 What a great way to end the week!

Had a wonderful Diwali lunch at the department!😁 Never thought I would dance in front of an audience comprising of my professors to lungi dance, but I did.🥰

Celebrated the dead today on the día de Muertos at the department. Amazing how many similarities there are between Indian and Mexican traditions.

ReplicationBench: Can AI Agents Replicate Astrophysics Research Papers? Frontier AI agents show increasing promise as scientific research assistants, and may eventually be useful for extended, open-ended research workflows. However, in order to use agents for novel resear...

Interesting #astromethods paper came out recently that looks at whether or not large language models can replicate astrophysics papers.

The answer: No. 🔭☄️

They had a ~20% replication score, even with quite a lot of help. And this was just replicating papers - not doing anything new...

A monte-meubles, anyone? 🤨

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Many Exoplanets

How do giant planets influence the type of #exoplanets that form in the habitable zone?

A thread 1/🧵

Lise Meitner - Wikipedia

Today's reading begins with Lise Meitner, who co-discovered nuclear fission (she wrote the paper!) and was in general an INCREDIBLE trailblazing scientist.

Except, as a Jew, she had to flee Nazi Germany to Sweden and lost her professorship in Berlin. The men she worked with got the prize instead 🧪🔭

Satellite spotting and caffeine high at the best telescope in the world (TBTW, SMARTS 0.9m). @noirlabastro.bsky.social

Glad to have caught one of the celebrities at Cerro Tololo, last week. 😁🐇

Just finished a complete night of observation. Dusk to dawn! Two more nights to go, all I am praying for now is some sleep.🫩

TSD: An inverse problem approach for recovering the exoplanetary atmosphere transmission spectrum from high-resolution spectroscopy Our ability to observe, detect, and characterize exoplanetary atmospheres has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, aided largely by developments in astronomical instrumentation; improveme...

Paper day!

You're doing ground-based high-resolution exoplanet transmission spectroscopy and want to analyse the planet—not the star or Earth's atmosphere.

Is there a way to disentangle your spectrum *without* destroying the planet signal?

arxiv.org/abs/2509.12737

🧵⬇️

🔭 #exoplanets #astromethods

Okay, now that I can stop talking with all caps, why is this important?

So, we're looking for planets like Earth, right? It's the only place we've found with life so far.

What makes it "Earth"? Well, some things include being a rocky planet, and being the right temperature for liquid water. (1/N)

Wound up with some cool @uchile.bsky.social merch and got a chance to interact with students from various departments at the International Graduate Student Gathering 2025😊 #fcfm #uchile

Scaling K2 VIII: Short-Period Sub-Neptune Occurrence Rates Peak Around Early-Type M Dwarfs We uniformly combined data from the NASA Kepler and K2 missions to compute planet occurrence rates across the entire FGK and M dwarf stellar range. The K2 mission, driven by targets selected by guest ...

Kepler mission: smaller stars have more short-period, small #exoplanets.

Theory: the smallest stars won’t have enough disk material to make small planets so there must be a turnover.

Kepler+K2: We have found a turnover!

Check out our newest Scaling K2 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05734

🧵 1/9
🔭🧪☄️

[2507.07181] Harshitha M. Parashivamurthy & Gijs D. Mulders: Radius valley scaling among low mass stars with TESS. link

[2507.18665] Karl Stapelfeldt & Eric Mamajek: NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) Science Gap List. link

Family feud: Exoplanet demographics version!
Also, no manual vetting and utilize metadata!👀 @aussiastronomer.bsky.social #sagan2025 #exoplanets

Finding atmospheres would be great, but not finding them would be profound! (In the case of M dwarfs) - Jacob Lustig-Yaeger #sagan2025 #exoplanets

Exoplanet demographics are key: Integrative. A key point from today's talk by Daniel Apai at #sagan2025 on future prospects of key planetary processes and trends in the sub-Neptune population. #exoplanets

Panel: Demographics of life in the universe!
Bio-signatures or Techno-signatures in the next 20 years?
#ssw2025 #exoplanets

The evolution of life may have its origins in outer space Astronomers find complex organic molecules – precursors to sugars and amino acids – in a planet-forming disc.

ALMA found evidence for complex organic compounds, such as sugars & amino acids, in a protoplanetary disc.

Thus, discs may inherit these complex molecules from interstellar clouds.

More in this press release by @mpi-astro.bsky.social : https://www.mpia.de/news/science/2025-05-v881-ori

🔭 🧪