Linn Boldt-Christmas

Linn Boldt-Christmas

@nplinnspace.bsky.social

🇸🇪 Exoplanet atmospheres + chemistry + formation at Uppsala University 🪐🔭 Also into astrobiology, policy, climate, equality/EDI, and scicomm ✨ (she/her) – linnboldtchristmas.wordpress.com

3,599 Followers 399 Following 272 Posts Joined Aug 2023
21 hours ago

Amazing set of preprints up today for everyone's favourite interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS!
Three different teams use three different telescopes to measure 3I's composition in water, nitrogen & carbon. The isotope ratios suggest 3I comes from a truly ancient star 🧪🔭☄️

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1 day ago
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The TESS All-Sky Rotation Survey: Periods for 944,056 Stars Within 500 pc Stellar rotation is a fundamental tracer of stellar magnetic evolution, age, and activity, with broad implications for Galactic archaeology and exoplanet characterization. The Transiting Exoplanet Sur...

I'm super excited to share a HUGE paper out from Young Worlds Lab team member Andy Boyle.

I present for you, ~900,000 rotation periods from TESS!

🤯🔭🧪⭐ #exoplanets #stellarrotation

arxiv.org/abs/2603.05586

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4 days ago
Five panel close-up stitched view of a rock formation on the surface of Mars, as seen by the Curiosity rover. The formation is a light, sand color and is covered in pea-sized nodules.

#PPOD: From orbit, parts of Mars look like sprawling spiderwebs etched across the hillsides. These patterns may record a time when groundwater flowed through large fractures in the rock, leaving minerals behind. 🧪 🔭

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5 days ago
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With the first Ariane 6 with four boosters, our fleet of rockets is complete 🚀

We will continue to work on upgrades to reduce costs, make our launch systems more robust and launch more often.

For example, the powerful P160C rocket motor will replace P120C on both Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets.

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4 days ago

🔭 Damn, sad to hear this — the PROBA-3 mission was a really exciting one for solar physics studies, basically consisting of two instruments making a coronagraph in space that was letting us study the Sun’s outer corona. Really hope it can be restored before it’s too late!

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5 days ago

Join @stsci.edu as a software engineer, working on interactive data analysis and visualization tools for astronomers. 🔭 #astrocode

Apps due March 18, 2026.

recruiting2.ultipro.com/SPA1004AURA/...

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5 days ago

📢 Less than 1 hour left until this talk begins!

14:00 UTC = 15:00 CET = 09:00 EST = 06:00 PST = 23:00 JST

If you haven't signed up to our mailing list to access the Zoom-link, you can also watch it live on our YouTube channel 🔭☄️🧪 Livestream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=058C...

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1 week ago
An image of the speaker, Miki Nakajima. She is smiling and looking into the camera. She has long dark hair and is wearing earrings & a white striped shirt with a black blazer. She is stood outdoors, leaning against a fence, with some trees visible but blurred in the background. A photo of... a magma ocean?! Not quite, because that would be a really difficult picture to take since we do not have any on hand. Instead, this is a photo that was taken in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, in May 1954 during the eruption of the Kilauea Volcano. The floor is literally lava, blackened and fragmented with what appears to be whirlpools of red and yellow lava in their centres. Close enough? Credit: Photo by J. P. Eaton, May 31, 1954

You've maybe heard of ocean planets 🌊🪐 but what about *electric magma* ocean planets?! 🔥⚡🌋

For our next #RockyWorldsDiscussion on Thu 5 March @ 14:00 UTC, Miki Nakajima will present exciting simulations on magma ocean dynamos in Earth and super-Earths

More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail...

🧪🔭

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1 week ago

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days).

And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of?

Small red stars.

PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!!

Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

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1 week ago
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JWST COMPASS: A NIRSpec G395H Transmission Spectrum of Radius Valley-Dweller TOI-260 b We present a JWST/NIRSpec G395H transmission spectrum of TOI-260 b, a $T_\mathrm{eq}\sim 490$ K, $R_\mathrm{p} = 1.76\,R_\oplus$ planet. The transmission spectrum is derived by combining two transit o...

Two new JWST COMPASS papers on arXiv today! ✨

Transmission spectra of HD 15337c (led by @nicolewallack.bsky.social & @planetarygao.bsky.social) and TOI-260 b (led by myself & @planetarygao.bsky.social):
arxiv.org/abs/2602.22327
arxiv.org/abs/2602.22329

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1 week ago
A white, glowing egg-shaped object lies in the centre of the black-and-white image, on a dark, starry background. Glowing streaks spread upwards from the object. In the top left, a yellow arrow marked ‘Sun’ points straight down, and a blue arrow marked ‘Velocity’ points towards the 7 o’clock direction. In the bottom left, an inset shows the same object on a lighter grey starry background, filled with ragged-edged, concentric egg shapes gradiented black-to-white.

Our first glimpse of comet 3I/ATLAS from Juice's science camera 😍☄️

The precious data from the mission's November observations of the interstellar comet arrived on Earth last week. Teams are now digging in to discover what they reveal.

Stay tuned for updates!

More 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...
🔭 🧪

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1 week ago

"There is no public mandate for a single company in one country to make changes on that scale to the planet’s atmosphere." - Lawler, @astrokiwi.bsky.social & Revell (2026)

"no group has the right to change the Earth's environment in any significant way w/o full int'l study & agreement" - IAU (1961)

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2 weeks ago
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Coronal loops on the eastern limb--here is a Blue/White/Red color scaling of SDO AIA 171 Å showing intense plasma loops over the Sun's limb.

The loops are boosting x-ray flux to above the C-class floor. The soures of these loops are active regions--we will see them soon.

#heliophysics

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2 weeks ago

This is so cool! You can see that at solar maximum (around 2002, 2013, and 2024 ish) HST drops more rapidly, because the increased solar activity puffs up the atmosphere, increasing drag on orbiting satellites 🧪🔭

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2 weeks ago
A still satellite image of the blizzard of 2026 in the Northeast United States. This image contains the GeoColor product from the GOES-19 weather satellite from the evening of 2026-02-23.

A view we will not soon forget.

The Blizzard of 2026.

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2 weeks ago
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Call for Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics The number of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by this nice graphic which shows the stats for new submissions for the last five years: It's very clear that the thicket is getting thicker! The increasing number of articles is of course very welcome indeed, but it is increasing the load on our Editorial Board and that includes me!

Call for Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

The number of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by this nice graphic which shows the stats for new submissions for the last five years: It's very clear that the thicket is getting thicker!…

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2 weeks ago
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Hedgerow prominences along the solar rim yesterday! Taken with the Lunt 50mm Ha Solar telescope with 2x Televue Powermate. #astrophotography #solarphotography

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2 weeks ago
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#NASAWebb provided the first vertical view of Uranus's ionosphere, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2602

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2 weeks ago
Abstract of the paper described above. Book cover “Science for Sustainability and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene. A nerd with a suit and tie (me) at the pontifical science academy. The ornate domed roof of the Pontifical Science Academy.

"Astrobiology and the Anthropocene: How Searching for Life Elsewhere Can Help Us Sustain Life on Earth".

A talk I gave at the Vatican.

Dropbox link to pdf of the paper
www.pas.va/en/publicati...

Pontifical Science Academy page with the talk video and paper text:
🧪

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5d9go...

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2 weeks ago
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The origin of life wasn't fat-free James Sáenz studies how fatty molecules might have helped life get started

Lipids are kind of the ignored middle children of origins of life research. It's time they got a bit of attention, too!

This week's post is a Q&A with geoscientist-turned-??? (interdisciplinary folks know the struggle) @jamessaenz.bsky.social about why there's no cutting the fat from origins. 🧪

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2 weeks ago

Can't believe I never heard of this before: a laser that shoots at space debris to effectively poke them out of a collision course?! Using fancy adaptive optics for locking in on faint targets?!? This is a project for space safety, yes, but also a project engineered carefully to be MY FAVOURITE 🥺🔭🧪

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3 weeks ago
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SNEWS

Love that you can't always tell whether a wacky scheme mentioned in @xkcd.com is actually real or not. SNEWS is real!

xkcd.com/3208/

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3 weeks ago
A night‑time photo of the Sentinel‑3A satellite launch, showing the rocket rising from the pad amid bright orange flames and thick billowing smoke. The rocket and launch towers are illuminated against a dark sky. Satellite view of Earth’s high northern latitudes, showing a vast expanse of snow‑covered and ice‑covered terrain in soft purple and blue tones. The left side of the image fades into darkness, marking the boundary between night and day. Cloud formations swirl above the icy landscape. A false‑colour infrared satellite image of a large hurricane approaching Florida. The storm’s cold central clouds appear deep blue, surrounded by lighter blues and yellows, while the surrounding warm areas show as bright red. Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas are outlined with labelled cities including Tampa, Miami, and Havana. A natural‑colour satellite image showing thick plumes of brown Saharan dust blowing westward from Africa over the deep‑blue Atlantic Ocean. Swirling white clouds sit above the water, while the coastline of northwest Africa and the bright desert interior are visible on the right.

Today we’re celebrating 52,600 orbits of Earth by the Sentinel‑3A satellite, together with @euspa.bsky.social and @eumetsat.int
For ten years, it has been delivering data on oceans, land, ice and atmosphere.
The constellation will grow with the launch of Sentinel‑3C in late 2026🚀

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3 weeks ago

🧪🔭 The Terra Hunting Experiment is *so close* to first light — our instrument HARPS3 is looking sharp!

If you wanna know more about our upcoming decade-long hunt for an exoplanet Earth, @sciencenews.bsky.social recently did this great article on what we’re up to: www.sciencenews.org/article/eart...

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3 weeks ago
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What's so special about Euler's number e? | Chapter 5, Essence of calculus YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown

…is useful for describing the physical world around us that often sees continuous change proportional to itself. As always, there’s a great 3Blue1Brown video on how e is defined and why it’s really just a neat shorthand that pops out (which I would argue is ”all” π is too) youtu.be/m2MIpDrF7Es?...

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3 weeks ago

I agree with @ravenonthill.bsky.social; it describes proportional/exponential change, which exists in biology to thermodynamics to nuclear physics. But e wouldn’t alter the environment; the environment would alter e, b/c e is defined by *us* from algebra. It’s the value where d/dt(e^t) = e^t, which…

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3 weeks ago
View of Mars from orbit, showing a curved horizon against the blackness of space. The dusty tan surface is marked by scattered impact craters and rugged ridges. Along the horizon, a thin pale bluish atmospheric layer creates a misty glow, and a single distinct white cloud is visible near the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Mars - Cloud over Promethei Terra

Full size 5k image and more info: flic.kr/p/2rWMYkb 🔭🧪
Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY

@esa.int Mars Express 2025-05-24
ID: HR000_0000 (ND+RED+GR+BL)

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3 weeks ago

Yep!

Excluding a few dinosaurs and traditional institutions that persist over on Twitter, I get all my science news, leads, and chats with scientists through here now.

The feeds also allow me to monitor all the topics I’m interested in so as soon as any new paper drops … it’s in my TL!

🔭🧪⚒️

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3 weeks ago

Once again, humanity has been fooled by the classic prank ”this is surely a fixed value that we can use as a unit of measurement forever” on us by the natural world around us — first a foot, then a stone, now the radius of Jupiter. When will we learn?! 🧪🔭

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