Brett Morris

For comparison, the $10m it cost US taxpayers to send the President on a vacation to his gold course last week is the same amount of money the entirety of the Solar System Science research and analysis program is getting this year (a cut of 82% from last year).

bsky.app/profile/batt...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s view of planetary nebula NGC 6072 in the near-infrared shows a complex scene of multiple outflows expanding out at different angles from a dying star at the center of the scene. There is one stretching from roughly 11 to 5 o’clock, another from 1 to 7 o’clock, and possibly a third from 12 to 6 o’clock. These outflows push gas toward the equatorial plane, forming a disk that appears to span from 9 to 3 o’clock. Astronomers suspect there is at least one other star interacting with the material cast off by the central dying star, creating the abnormal appearance of this planetary nebula. In this image, the red areas represent cool molecular gas, for example, molecular hydrogen.

Stars don't go quietly into that good night. 🔭🧪

Here, a dying star is spitting itself out in all directions. A companion star nearby may be shaping the points in the splatter.

webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

That Bernoulli curve!

also: handle checks out.

Figure 1. Panel A: Light curve of the DWF030225.574- 545707.45 flare expressed as g magnitudes in excess of the quiescent stellar brightness. As noted in Webb et al. (2021), the lightcurve does not return to pre-flare brightness before the end of the observing period. Panel B: Raw d∥ measured on the images, relative to source position at t0. The weighted average d ∥ of 91 reference stars, weighted by the stars’ astrometric standard deviation across the entire time series, is shown as a grey line and the standard deviation of their relative position itself is shown as a filled region. Panel C: detrended d∥ of the flare star generated by subtracting the weighted average d∥ of the reference stars shown in Panel B. A 9-point rolling median is shown by the dashed black line. Panel D: Rolling median over an 9-point window of the detrended data shown in Panel C, and the time series used for subsequent analysis in this work.

Neat! @flarelord.bsky.social used ground-based photometry to measure the flare temperature on an M7 dwarf.

How do you measure temperature without spectroscopy? Trick question! You use the Earth's atmosphere as a prism and watch the star appear to jump across the sky. 🔭🧪

arxiv.org/abs/2507.19584

Will AI “help” to exponentiate the enshittification of the internet? Certainly! Don’t need to prognosticate on that, we’re living it.

How’s your jet pack lately, and your flying car? Predicting the future is hard business.

Actually heartbreaking, the list of colleagues that have run the show behind the scenes for so many years who are saying their pre-emptive goodbyes and taking literally thousands of years of amassed knowledge and expertise with them.

Not to mention camaraderie and community.

Morale is ... bleak.

Feels like temperature is 112 F, 44 C

I love Baltimore I do I do. I really do.

The image shows a false-colour image of the Apep colliding wind nebula as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the mid-infrared. In the centre of the image, there is an orange-coloured spiral coil of dust, not dissimilar in shape from a snail's shell. There are two concentric repeats of the coil that are larger and encompass the inner shell, and these further out shells of dust are coloured red and get dimmer as they get further from the centre of the image. These far out coils of dust look somewhat like translucent spheres. At the very centre of the image is a small spikey object which are the three stars in Apep that create and hide behind the dust shells. There are stars scattered throughout the image, each with a snowflake-like 'point spread function' that spreads the central brightness of the stars into diffraction spikes. Image credit: Shashank Dholakia for R M T White et al 2025. 'The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula'. PI: Yinuo Han.

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610

We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

No more universe for you. 🧪🔭

Here's the 3D, narrated movie version: youtu.be/_QvlRH-q0nw?... 🔭🧪

listening to my recently acquired Rumours on vinyl and questioning the mixing choices made on the 2013 Super Deluxe remaster and realizing:

I'm a dad.

Israeli Troops Kill Dozens Near Border Crossing, Gaza Health Officials Say

Hungry people being slaughtered. We can’t allow this to be normal.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/w...

Yes! All observations will be publicly available immediately to anyone with internet access and an email address. We’re building a managed Jupyter environment on AWS, so anyone can can access and explore the full set of observations on their laptop.

Very grateful to do it, Ben. 🙌

I can’t teleport you to Maryland. But I can work every day to ensure you* have easy access to data analysis and visualization tools for Roman data in the cloud. And I will.

*these are free to everyone, everywhere, always #astrocode

Brett standing in front of a window overlooking the big clean room at NASA Goddard, where spacecraft are assembled. The Roman Space Telescope is behind Brett to the right.

The Roman Space Telescope, without its solar array, and with a foil covering for thermal vacuum testing.

The Roman Space Telescope solar array.

To the right you’ll see the Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard yesterday, and me! 🧪🔭

This is the first space telescope that I’ve supported before its launch. If you can’t tell by my face, I really hope it won’t be the last.

Last time I visited this clean room, it held JWST 🥹

The first photos from the Vera Rubin Observatory are stunning — thanks in part to the University of Arizona, which helped build its mirror. Proud to see Arizona leading the way in space science.

Bold move by Texas to say that the First Amendment only applies during daylight hours.

Scientists have released the closest images ever taken near the sun, captured by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flying 3.8 million miles above the solar surface.

See more images of solar eruptions on the sun: wapo.st/3Irm3P3

Atmospheric Escape and Replenishment in Planetary Systems Workshop

Abstracts close this Friday for the Fall 2025 STScI Science Workshop on Atmospheric Escape and Replenishment. We'd love to see you in Baltimore in November!

Check it out and let me know if you've any questions. 🔭 #exoplanets

www.stsci.edu/contents/eve...

Relative brightness maps of Antares over the course of a year, showing the changing brightness and shapes of convective cells in the stellar photosphere.

The brightest star in Scorpius, Antares, is nearing the end of its 15 million year life. It's so large that the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be inside the star. 🔭🧪

Pilate et al. published brightness maps of the star, showing gigantic convective cells.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.08614

Absolutely perfect, no notes.

I'm a professor at the flagship university for the fourth whitest state in the US. Over 80% of our students are white.

The biggest barrier to access here is that due to lack of state funding, we have top 10 highest tuition per capita of public unis in the country.

We also have a food pantry.

Purple haired woman in graffiti with white glasses and light bulbs and flamingos in her hair.

Does this remind anyone else of @dalcantonjd.bsky.social? 🔭

Paper I is accepted – but upcoming work will tie these measurements to other datasets, among lots of other things!

Thank you Gerard!

🫶 thanks Ben!

Interactive visualization tool for time-series spectra from the Olin Wilson Legacy Survey (OWLS). OWLS is monitoring stellar magnetic activity cycles with optical echelle spectra of FGKM stars with the ARC 3.5 m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory (APO).

Until the spectra are available on MAST, here's an interactive visualization app for exploring OWLS spectra and the corresponding MWO HK Project chromospheric activity time series, when available. 🔭🧪 #stellarastro

Try it out: github.com/bmorris3/owl...

Powered by viz tools from @stsci.edu! ❤️