Hugh Osborn

I also added a bunch of IRL example use cases to the readthedocs monotools.readthedocs.org.
That includes one pentatransit candidate (yes sometimes 5 transits is still not enough to know the orbital period), and another where a single long-period giant planet transit is lurking in the raw flux only.

I finally got around to updating the transit modelling package I maintain for single/mono & duotransiting planets - MonoTools github.com/hposborn/Mon.... You can also pip install/upgrade. The previous version was in dependency hell due to PyMC3 but this one uses pymc(v5) simplifying installation.

I went running around Lötschental and through Blatten a couple of years ago. It's so weird to get my head around the fact that, as of yesterday... it no longer exists.

Birchgletscher collapse, before and after.

In the photo three people in white overalls and caps stand in front of the instrumentation in a white hall. The equipment, about twice as tall as the people in the picture, consists of a black four-stepped-platform that supports 24 cameras. These resemble cylinders flaring at the top, not unlike big ice-cream cones. Each cylinder is wrapped in black material; the top flare has a metallic finish and a white lid.

👀 Plato's eyes are growing!

✅ The activities to assemble our terrestrial planet hunting mission are progressing well, with 24 of the spacecraft’s 26 cameras now installed by OHB in Germany.

Read more 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

🔭 🧪
#exoplanets #instrumentation

Nice to see this research note on K2-18b from @astrojake.bsky.social, which demonstrates that a flat line (i.e. no spectral features) is a good fit to the MIRI data.

#exoplanet 🪐 🔭

arxiv.org/abs/2504.15916

Artist's impression of the exoplanet K2-18b. Credit: A. Smith, University of Cambridge.

𝗡𝗼, 𝗮 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗞𝟮-𝟭𝟴𝗯'𝘀 𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲.

K2-18b is back in the news, now with a bold claim that biosignature molecules (DMS and/or DMDS) have been 'detected at 3σ'.

Most exoplanet astronomers are extremely sceptical about these claims, let's see why (1/n).

🔭🧪🪐 #exoplanet

Maybe I'm just a grumpy villager about to be eaten, but I can't bring myself to read another over-hyped press release from the same boy who has already claimed he saw a wolf 5 times with barely any evidence...

🚨New Episode out now featuring the ever enthusiastic Dr Ben Pope from University of Queensland in Australia. Ben talks with the team about all things exoplanets🪐, stars✨, and instrumentation🛰️, including how to track solar flares using tree rings! 🌲https://www.exocast.org/exocast-77b/

An infographic for Gaia showing the hat shaped satellite on a backdrop of a model of the milky way derived from Gaia data: 3 trillion obserations, 2 billion stars and other objects, 938 million camera pixels on board, 15300 spacecraft "pirouettes", 55 kg of cold nitrogen gas consumed, 3827 days in science operations, 580 million accesses of the catalog so far, 13000 refereed publications so far, 2.8 million commands sent to spacecraft, 142 TB downloaded data (compressed), 500 TB volume of data release 4 (5.5 years of observations, and 50000 hours of ground station time used. Whew!

Y'all @esa.int mission Gaia was truly the lil' engine that could. It operated for 10+ years, unlocking both the nearby galaxy all the way to billions stars across the Milky Way. A triumph of investing in necessary, unglamorous measurements that touch all areas of galactic astronomy. #AAS245 🔭🧪

RIP ESA's Gaia mission. Your legacy in astronomy will live on for decades... Partly because we won't actually get your last data release for decades.

I feel like overleaf should really automatically ask "Hey - do you want this document you've worked on for a week to become the default .tex file?".
I say that as someone who now has two sets of detailed comments... on a completely out-of-date version of a document 🤦‍♂️

Yeah me and a couple of friends would also like to know 🙋‍♂️

The brain is a strange thing. For whatever reason, I struggle to consciously tie a neat bow when e.g. gift wrapping... but if I imagine the string/thread/etc is somewhere near my foot and let my subconscious shoe-tying muscle memory take over, I get a perfect bow every time.

It joins two other low-precision RV instruments on La Silla built for #exoplanets:
Coralie on the 1.2m Swiss Telescope (built 1998)
FEROS on the 2.2m Danish telescope (built: 1998)
So it's hard not to have the feeling that PLATOspec is about 26 years behind the cutting edge!

It's great to convert an unused 1.5m telescope for exoplanet observations... but I have always been confused by this new spectrograph at ESO's La Silla in Chile. It's named PLATOspec but has no official connection to the PLATO mission. And 3m/s won't be precise enough to be very useful either.

I have worked on & off on ESA's planet-hunting #PLATO mission for the last 7.5yrs, and it's kinda crazy to me that, when I get the question "so when will it launch?" in 3 weeks time, I will actually be able to answer "the end of next year".

A brief intro:
I'm Hugh Osborn, and I like finding exoplanets 🔭. Currently I'm a Postdoc at the University of Bern & ETH Zurich. I search for hints of undetected sub-Neptune planets with NASA's TESS mission, and confirm them with ESA's Cheops telescope.