Sierk van Terwisga

A dramatic three-colour Hubble image of an edge-on disk, with distant stars in the background. The disks' midplane forms a dark lane in the middle and hides a young star. Above and below it, dramatic wisps of backlit dust can be seen. To the north of the disk, faint filaments of material connect to the disk. On the left side of the dust lane, there is a hint of a spiral. Descriptions of the disk features are based on Fig. 2 in the paper.

Very cool work from Monsch et al. on the arxiv today, on a recently-discovered protoplanetary disk seen very nearly edge-on. It has weird, wispy structures and asymmetries - far more dynamic than we normally imagine disks to be! And, of course, it makes for beautiful images.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.11819

‘Almost unheard of’: experts find more music by English composer Henry Purcell Printed score and keyboard manuscript by Purcell, who died in 1695, unearthed in Worcestershire and Norfolk

GOOD NEWS !
"A team of musicologists has unearthed the printed score of a previously unknown Purcell song, as well as the original manuscript for various keyboard compositions."
#baroque #music
www.theguardian.com/music/2025/o...

We bail out banks. We bail the steel industry, the water industry, airlines and hotels.

The UK higher education sector directly employs nearly 1M people. It's the envy of the world and benefits almost every area of UK society. But apparently it can go burn.

Another argument against these things is that, if someone else's missile defense is 90% effective, you have no reason to not try it anyway and maybe blow up just one major city instead of ten, lowering the barrier to a nuclear exchange between superpowers.

“Black Hole Stars” could solve JWST riddle of overly massive early galaxies A newly discovered distant object that astronomers have dubbed “The Cliff” could solve a riddle posed by some of the first observations of the distant universe with the James Webb Space Telescope, rel...

1/ 🔭 Astronomers have discovered 'The Cliff,' a distant object that may hold the key to understanding the mysterious 'little red dots' observed by the James Webb Space Telescope #JWST. These could be supermassive black holes, not galaxies! #Astronomy #JWST

It's lovely (and reminded me that everyone should know the doors to the Pantheon in Rome are, likely, the original bronze slabs (with later decoration) from 126ish).

Nederlandse F-35s zijn al gestationeerd in Polen in de context van de NATO, en hebben - volgens het laatste nieuws - ook concreet geholpen met het onderscheppen van deze drones.

Really cool work from Jenny Frediani, in the XUE collaboration led by @maclart.bsky.social - a protoplanetary disk with way more CO2 and less H2O than expected. Read the whole paper here: www.aanda.org/component/ar...

That is indeed odd. If I understand correctly it's in an older moving group? Maybe it's just a lucky straggler; but I do wonder if the fact that it has formed a planet has been good for the disk's survival.

A white protoplanetary disc at the centre of the picture takes up most of the frame. The elliptical cloud of dust and gas consists of some gaps creating a ring-like structure to the cloud. In one of the larger gaps/rings a little dot (a planet) is visible.

A very hungry planet! 🪐

What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞

Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/

🔭 🧪 #exoplanets
📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it. TERRY PRATCHETT

Dat is natuurlijk waar, maar hij zegt niet dat het direct moet. En door nu op te schieten met klimaatbeleid ontstaat ook ruimte voor de innovatie die op de langere termijn nog steeds nodig is.

But what if it's the opposite, and the aliens are testing humanity to see if we're rational enough as a species to not freak out at an interesting interstellar comet when we detect one!? At this rate he's actively chasing them off!

Avi Loeb Figured Out Why Spacecraft Have Comae! Avi Loeb has two new blog posts out about 3I/ATLAS, and they’re doozies! Steve Desch recently posted a snarky piece entitled “This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grow...

In Avi's latest he finally figured out why spacecraft would have dusty comae!

It almost feels like he read @deschscoveries.bsky.social's complaint about how lazy his "it's aliens" claims have been lately and decided to up his game.

Loeb: we must stick to the facts, not judge things based on public opinion.

Also Loeb: Look at how many likes and messages my ideas get! I must be doing it right.

Nederlandse Omroep Stichting NOS.nl - Nieuws, Sport en Evenementen op Radio, TV en Internet

Good news, a few days later: there is now a message on their corrections page: nos.nl/herstel . Openness is essential here, so I am happy they did the right thing.

"He may talk rubbish but he has an eye for beauty" sounds like exactly the kind of thing 30s intellectuals said of the fascists of their time.

Also, Trump, an eye for beauty? Has he seen how Trump dresses, how he decorates his buildings, any of it?

The bigger problem is that LLMs are prone to hallucinations, and everyone by now knows this, and even if you do not feel - as I do - that it makes them unfit for journalism by definition, it clearly requires high editorial care. That has failed here. What else has slips through?

So a lovely opportunity to accurately inform the public of some interesting history is missed, the hard work of everyone who didn't put AI slop into this production is wasted, and it's not communicated about to the public at all. This is a problem.

Blatantly AI-generated images of Anne of Brittany in a @sport.nos.nl discussion of today's Tour Femmes stage, which have now vanished into nothingness (sadly, before I could archive them). Modern French flags in quasi-historical illustrations kind of gave it away (as did the art style).

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

The way the ELT's primary mirror casually dwarfs the crane parked next to it... It really is extremely large, isn't it!? Great pictures!

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

A young gas giant and hidden substructures in a protoplanetary disk - Nature Astronomy ALMA and Gaia data combine to reveal a young gas giant in the protoplanetary disk around MP Mus. Previously unseen substructures, visible only at longer wavelengths, suggest that more planets may hide...

Really cool paper from Alvaro Ribas, @mvioque.bsky.social et al. on MP Mus, where Gaia astrometry and ALMA imaging at 3mm both point to a young Jupiter-mass planet embedded in the disk at ~1-3 au 🔭

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spotted quite a bit of your JWST jewelry at the EAS this year, and it looked great!

Chart showing brightness of different mega constellation satellites

The major large satellite constellations are still too bright, reports a new paper.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.00107

Almost all Starlink, BlueBird, Qianfan, Guowang, and OneWeb satellites impact astronomy, and most are above the limit where they are visible to the naked eye too.

I was just about to ask - isn't this in Master and Commander? It is, indeed, a fantastic passage.

Blutspendeaktion in Messendorf Blut spenden, Leben retten – der SK Sturm Graz lädt zur Blutspendeaktion ins Trainingszentrum Messendorf.

Ich bin zutiefst berindruckt von der Solidarität der Menschen hier in Graz. SK Sturm organisiert Blutspenden: sksturm.at/n/blutspende...

Gestern war schon eine Blutspendeaktion. Umliegende Restaurants haben die Helfer und Angehörige vor Ort versorgt...

Menschlich sein in schlimmen Zeiten.

Gewone mensen die zomaar andere mensen van de weg halen en uit hun auto trekken. Heel "begrijpelijk".

Astronomers double down on claim of strongest evidence for alien life Are there aliens living on the exoplanet K2-18b? Some astronomers believe they have evidence for molecules on the planet that must have a biological origin, but others disagree

Ready for the latest K2-18b drama?

Madhusudhan is claiming *even stronger* evidence of DMS after analysing both near-infrared and mid-infrared JWST data. But another study finds no evidence at all.

Read on for a quick update on everyone's f̶a̶v̶o̶u̶r̶i̶t̶e most newsworthy exoplanet. 🧵

#exoplanets 🔭