Hannah Wakeford

Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People - The Glee Club The iconic Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People season extravaganza is headed to Cardiff for the first time

People have asked us for ages to bring Nine Lessons to Cardiff so we're slated to be there on Dec 9th this year! That is, if all of you who begged us to bring the show there buy tickets coz it's not looking great right now... @robinince.bsky.social @garwboy.bsky.social www.glee.co.uk/performer/ni...

Don’t disagree that this is a whole
lot of time from a whole lot of people with little chance of success. I worry that limiting to every other year limits the ability for short term contract people from getting something from it for their own research or for their CV

Illustration of magnified Webb mirror hexagons showing different images of Webb's science capabilities with an image of the telescope in the middle hexagon

For #JWST Cycle 5, proposals should be submitted even if observations appear non-schedulable in APT due to guide star availability in bright crowded fields. Get the details: ow.ly/qlTG50X8LK8

a panda bear is hanging from a tree branch . Alt: a panda bear is hanging from a tree branch then falling out of sight as it breaks

It is that time of year when these damn pandas plague us all!
#JWSTC5 #exoplanets

The End of the Universe After a magnificent* 13.8 billion years** astronomer Chris Lintott (Sky at Night) and Steve Pretty (Hackney Colliery Band) lead a funeral and wake for the universe, as it sadly heads into heat death. ...

London! Next Friday! The Universe WILL end in the company of @astrokatie.com, Steve Pretty, many musicians and myself. Do please come join us wegottickets.com/event/676292

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease.

There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done."

1/🧵

These alien planets are astronomers’ favourites: here’s why Space scientists look back on 30 years of exoplanet discoveries — from rows of massive ‘super-Earths‘ to worlds with perfectly synchronized orbits.

Thirty years ago Monday, astronomers announced the first planet around a Sunlike star. Since then they have cataloged more than 6,000 alien worlds.

I asked a bunch of astronomers what their favorite exoplanet is, and wrote about it for @nature.com. What's yours?

🧪 #astronomy

UT Austin Astro is hiring! It's an open call, but definitely interested in getting another exoplanet person! Feel free to reach out with any questions about the department or living in Austin! aas.org/jobregister/...

Today feels like a good time to announce ten new special guests for this year's Nine Lessons shows including @particleclara.bsky.social, @mariaviolaris.bsky.social, @mrsamsee.bsky.social, @stellarplanet.bsky.social, @akshatrathi.bsky.social, John Hegly and more! Tix cosmicshambles.com/ninelessons

YouTube video by Simon Clark Should lying about climate change be illegal?

This year we've been really swinging for the fences.

Our latest video is our biggest one yet, nearly an hour long and involving half a dozen experts.

Asking "Should lying about climate change be illegal?" and, if so, how do we make it so?

youtu.be/FKtCuwfUCJg

A proud part of the ~12% even though schools not that long ago tried to force it out of me. Data always requires careful and measured interpretation.

Alien Skies: Exploring Distant Exoplanet Atmospheres with Webb YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute

Did you miss last week's Deep Space Dialogues with STScI's Nestor Espinoza, as he chatted about atmospheres of distant exoplanets? Watch it now and learn about how #NASAWebb is dramatically changing our understanding of planetary systems in the cosmos. 🔭 🧪

I'm looking for a part-time research assistant to help research and fact-check long form YouTube videos, with an emphasis on climate misinformation campaigns.

If you or someone you know would be a good fit, please check out this form! Applications close on 26/9.

forms.gle/mpyzcdjwv63C...

Fractal Aggregate Aerosols in the Virga Cloud Code I: Model Description and Application to a Benchmark Cloudy Exoplanet We introduce new functionality to treat fractal aggregate aerosol particles within the Virga cloud modeling framework. Previously, the open source cloud modeling code Virga (Batalha et al. 2025), the ...

✨✨✨Another Virga advert✨✨✨

Introducing V2.0, with fractal aggregate clouds! Restricted to spheres no more! We handle the dynamics and the optics self consistently.

Led by me and PhD candidate extraordinaire Matt Lodge (who is looking for a postdoc 👀 and is amazing).

arxiv.org/abs/2509.06708

Book called The Whispers of Rock on a background of orange sandstone

Hand holding a laminated siltstone. Words say what does it feel like to hold silence in your hands

Hand holding limestone with a sea urchin fossils. Text says what can you teach me about cycles of love and loss

Hands holding a piece of coal. Test says will you ever learn to let me go?

Happy Publication Day to The Whispers of Rock! A journey that started with the Nan Shepherd Prize to this epic work that reframes our relationship with rock.
Link to buy: anjanakhatwa.com/writing
#rockwhisperer #WhispersOfRock #naturwriting

There's a decent chance of seeing the aurora tonight - it may be visible as far south as the Midlands (perhaps even further south) 🌃

A beautiful depiction of planet formation

It has been ten years since my PhD now officially marked with a new passport 🛂 taking it for a test drive to the US of A. See you in a week.

A plot of a spectrum of transit depth versus wavelength showing large NUV absorption and weak H2O absorption at NIR wavelengths.

I'm very excited to be able to share Yayaati Chachan's Hubble/WFC3 transit spectrum of ultra-hot Jupiter KELT-20b.

Using *all* of WFC3's grisms, we get a 0.2-1.7 micron spectrum showing absorption by metals at in the UV and only weak absorption by water in the IR. 🔭🪐

Dayside average (a) air temperature, (b) cloud ice, (c) cloud liquid water, and (d) graupel as a function of height in our M09 simulations for the surface pressure of 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 10 bar. The figure shows that with increasing surface pressure, the lapse rate becomes larger, the cloud water content diminishes, while the graupel content does not show a clear trend. Note that because the dry atmospheric mass differs between our simulations, the increase in the mass mixing ratios with pressure in this figure appears much greater than the increase in the vertically integrated cloud content shown in Figs 1(c) and 3.

Published in #MNRAS: "Lightning activity on a tidally locked terrestrial exoplanet in storm-resolving simulations for a range of surface pressures", Sergeev et al. This is Fig. 4: to read the paper please visit academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... @oxfordacademic.bsky.social @royalastrosoc.bsky.social

a cartoon drawing of a person using a laptop with the words write written around them ALT: a cartoon drawing of a person using a laptop with the words write written around them

I do my best writing early in the morning before getting out of my pajamas. I don’t know why I try to force it any other way to much stress and inefficiency.

Yes, high spectral resolution in space is surely the future for exoplanets. It doesn't even need to be that "high" res, JWST's R=2,700 is delivering great science, just think what could be done with a R=3,000-5,000 integral field spectrograph behind a coronagraph on HWO 🤯

If you want know all things #HabitableWorldsObservatory then follow @drjovian.bsky.social for the next two days as she posts from the #HWO25 meeting in Washington DC.
Thanks Jo for keeping us posted ☺️

Faraday Discovery Fellowships Accelerated International Route | Royal Society The Faraday Discovery Fellowships Accelerated International Route provides a fast-track option for attracting mid-career researchers looking to relocate to the UK from overseas, providing up to £4m ov...

Our new Faraday Discovery Fellowships Accelerated International Route provides a fast-track option for international mid-career researchers looking to relocate to the UK, providing up to £4m over a five-year period. Find out more: #RSGrants royalsociety.org/grants/farad...

I love telling this story in the Tyndall lecture theater at Bristol and getting the students to help with repeating the same experiment she did. #EnvironmentalPhysics

BBC Four - The Sky at Night, Exoplanets - Strange New Worlds The team explore one of the newest areas of modern astronomy, the search for exoplanets.

Sunday plug for tomorrow’s excellent #SkyAtNight on the diversity of exoplanets, including a visit to @esa.int to see PLATO. Also happens to mark 25 years since my first appearance… www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

We also did not foresee the shit show that the world is throwing right now which meant many attendees could no longer attend at all and places were given to the reserve list as liberally as we could. Does not solve it but we tried I guess is what I am trying to say. We will try better

Thanks for sharing. We of course try to take this on board as much as possible and will consider this for future meetings. We did ensure that the attendees were notified 3 months on advance to allow for this but know that it cannot solve all issues. Any further advance would not have been possible

Wakeford: the Habitable Worlds Observatory will be incredible for UV-Optical spectra. Mega-Hubble!

Look out on arXiv next week for community white papers on the science we can do with HWO.

#AllTheWavelengths

Done!

Climate change is real and causes extreme weather conditions like storms. The companies responsible need to be held accountable. Show them we know!