Interview on the Chicken or Egg problem of planet formation on Forbes!
www.forbes.com/sites/bruced...
There is now a planetesimal bearing my name!! Nice to meet you 6054 P-L!
And thank you IAU for making it happen.
www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/17-ni...
To clarify: I just do not know how it would help to strike, as all my tasks would still need to get done if I take a day off. I would just be punishing myself by having an even higher workload the rest of the week, so what is the point? Honestly curious about other people's thoughts.
Today was supposed to be a strike in the Netherlands on behalf of the higher education, against the major budget cuts. I think it got mostly cancelled due to the (completely coincidental) national train strike, but I was still wondering: is a strike the best way to protest as academics?
📣 Calling all rocky enthusiasts! We are thrilled to announce that the ROCKY WORLDS 4 Conference will take place 19-23 Jan 2026 in Groningen, NL 🇳🇱 This is the 4th Meeting in our series & we can't wait to see you there!
Abstract submission is NOW OPEN groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/groningen-2026
🪐☄️🔭
Moral of the story: don't ever let ChatGPT write your papers or proposals, because it will actually make up complete references, and will (initially) insist that they are real.
When I tell ChatGPT again that it is wrong, it finally admits that it cannot find the right paper and that I am probably looking for one of the actual van der Marel 2021 papers (which it lists correctly).
Like seriously: it is not just garbling of authors. THERE IS NO PAPER WITH THIS TITLE OR TOPIC. The DOI points to a non-existing wegpage.
It got worse. When I told ChatGPT that it was mistaken, it told me that it got confused by the journal name, which should be ApJ, not AJ. And then it produced the 'correct' paper (see below) WHICH DOES NOT EXIST AT ALL!!
Reviewing a proposal that cites one of my four 2021 papers. I checked the reference to see which one it is and the volume and page do not correspond to any of my papers. I asked ChatGPT and it claims is van der Marel & Mulders 2021 with a different volume and page. Did I reverse-engineer ChatGPT?
Tomorrow I will be at a 'talk show' on the great outdoors organized by TU Delft, talking about stories from observing nights at high altitude.
Winner of two prizes at the Leiden Allegro ARC node competition, both the one for most requested hours (of all proposals combined) and for the smallest proposal 😁 #almacycle12
The usual curve of proposal submissions on ALMA deadline day. It looks like we may end up a bit lower than last Cycle, unless we get a final sprint. I'm going to bet on 1560. What's your guess?
#almacycle12
Looks like we are somewhat below the trend of last year. How many people are still submitting in the final 10 hours? #almacycle12
It is that time of the year again:
#almacycle12
Really happy that three of my master students have managed to get a PhD position this year! Curious to see where their research is going to bring them 💪
here's my story on the (largely dutch) discovery that most protoplanetary disks are small and may spawn super-earths (for the website of sky and telescope): 🔭
skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...
Exactly! Always consider the biases in your sample.
Nee, geen geluid, ik had het even snel in elkaar gezet en ik weet uit ervaring dat ik ga hakkelen bij zo'n opname, en dan moet het telkens weer opnieuw. Misschien doe ik dat later nog.
At 0.25" (~35 au) resolution, these small disks would remain 'unresolved': that means that they appear to be as large as the beam size and you cannot know whether they are indeed the beam size or much smaller. Their size would be listed as upper limit of <20 au. Now it's shown to be much smaller!
Before ALMA, there was no possibility to infer the disk size from such faint disks at all! For the brightest and largest ones we could measure them (somewhat) with SMA, but no more. However, these disks were mapped before with earlier ALMA observations at low-resolution, ~0.25" (Ansdell+2016/2018).
And I was working with ALMA Early Science data during grad school and I'm still amazed with what ALMA can do these days 😄
Please note, mas stands for milliarcseconds, not microarcseconds! It's still impressive of course.
To accompany the press release from this morning on the compact disks, I made a short 2 minute video that showcases the key result. Enjoy watching!
youtu.be/jvT1wD7yCec
Protoplanetaire schijven zijn veel kleiner dan eerder gedacht.
Door Universiteit Leiden geleid onderzoek van Osmar M. Guerra-Alvarado et al., geaccepteerd voor publicatie in A&A.
www.astronomie.nl/ni...
Super proud of my PhD student Osmar who discovered that the so-called 'compact disks' around young stars are REALLY REALLY small! Look at the full sample of Lupus disks, observed at 30 mas resolution with ALMA.
Help! The arxiv submission e-mail suddenly states that it may take 2 business days to go through technical/moderation checks. I thought this was always just 1 day. How long did it take you to get accepted on arxiv recently? I'm freaking out because this has to coincide with a press release tomorrow.
Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated
I've just turned down an invitation for an event in the US this summer as well. There were multiple reasons, including visa appointment issues, but reading the answers on this thread I think I made the right decision: I would not want to go through ridiculous US customs questioning right now.
