John Ilee

For anyone in London next weekend - get yourself down to this absolutely wonderful combination of art & astronomy. It’s a really special place.

The future of fundamental physics research in the UK is under serious threat because of the massive government cuts to STFC funding. Please read this open letter by advanced fellows.
advancedfellows-openletter-stfc.github.io/index.html

Very interesting to see this laid out by someone who was, until very recently, on STFC's Science Board.

BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science A weekly programme looking at the science that's changing our world.

Listeners to Radio 4’s Inside Science today get an essay from me in defence of astronomy as pure research. Please listen in and let me know what you think.

Show starts 4.30pm GMT here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

Read our full response here: www.iop.org/about/news/v...

The IOP have set up a mechanism to measure the impact of this news, and ask that anyone impacted to please complete this form and provide as much information as they can along with any evidence: www.iop.org/feedback-fol...

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Another positive is that the community response to the planned cuts 16 years ago actually had an effect. Some extra funding was found at the last minute. So, it is worth speaking out and pointing out these planned cuts will do a lot of damage to very active, and successful, research areas. 4/4

Proposed budget cuts a catastrophe for UK astronomy The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (...

The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

We're so excited to share the results of the ALMA large program ARKS that studied the distribution of dust and gas in a sample of 24 exoKuiper belts. With @lucaroundtheworld.bsky.social, Meredith Hughes and a large collaboration, we just published 10 papers presenting our first results arkslp.org

Well this is worrying. NASA has maintained funding for ADS but not SciX (a broader database). In response, management is planning to *close* ADS in Feb 2026, forcing all users to switch to SciX. ☄️🔭

Funding info: ads.harvard.edu/adsug/2025/0...
Transition plan: ads.harvard.edu/adsug/2025/0...

YEMS is hiring a postdoc to work on planet formation, exoplanet detection, high contrast imaging, and/or related topics.

🫸https://aas.org/jobregister/ad/811cf8bb

a cartoon of homer simpson is holding a newspaper that says old man yells at cloud ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson is holding a newspaper that says old man yells at cloud

#aurora

🔊Announcing a new Physics/Astro PhD scholarship scheme in Edinburgh, for students from a Black heritage, inc mixed Black background. Please help me spread the word. The scholarship covers all tuition fees, living costs & research travel. #blackinSTEM 🔭👩‍🔬⚛️

ℹ️: www.ph.ed.ac.uk/studying/pos...

We can see Io rotate slightly over the hour-long timelapse, tracking volcanoes on its surface!

And check out the Conversation piece for a cool slider showing how NGC 1068 lines up perfectly with previous data from LBTI.

So, the main takeaway: you need to correctly account for dust evolution and ice chemistry when trying to understand complex molecules in planet forming disks!

Unfortunately including this is time consuming and computationally difficult, but ultimately we think this is going to be the only way to reconcile the models with the observations in the future.

So what is this telling us? A big limitation of the modelling here is that it is static, but we know dust grains move radially and vertically in disks and can redistribute molecules when they do so.

The second surprising result is that even after throwing the chemical kitchen sink at the model (honestly, see Table 2) we could *not* reproduce the column density profile of methanol. We didn't have enough of it (short by ~1-2 orders of magnitude) and it was all in the wrong place (the outer disk).

TW Hya is great because it's so well studied and there is a wealth of information on the disk physical structure. We combined some pretty advanced chemical modelling (thanks to Catherine) with a really well benchmarked model of the disk (thanks to Jenny).

Our first surprising result was than the methanol was cold (~35K) suggesting it wasn't coming from thermal desorption of ices on dust grains, but instead by non-thermal processes. This led us to start looking more into how it could be formed chemically…

We can look at the relative intensities of each of these transitions to pull out physical information like excitation temperature and column density for the methanol gas, and since the observations were spatially resolved, we see how these change radially through the disk.

Methanol is the starting point for lots of important prebiotic chemistry. So far it has only been detected in a disk around one solar-type star, TW Hya. We used #ALMA to go back and get some very sensitive, high-resolution observations of multiple transitions for the first time.

Great to see our paper on methanol in TW Hya finally come out today (with Catherine Walsh and Jenny Calahan). A quick overview.... 🔭 ☄️ #radioastro

arxiv.org/abs/2510.04106

Ultimately, we think including these types of processes is going to be the only way to reconcile the models with the observations. But the main takeaway is that the distribution of important prebiotic molecules in disks is likely highly dependent on treating dust (and ice) evolution correctly!

So what is this telling us? A big limitation of the modelling here is that it is static, but we know dust grains move radially and vertically in disks and can redistribute molecules when they do so.

The second surprising result is that, even after throwing the chemical kitchen sink at the model, we could *not* reproduce the column density profile of methanol. We didn’t have enough of it (short by ~1-2 orders of magnitude) and it was all in the wrong place (the outer disk).

TW Hya is great because it’s so well studied and there is a wealth of information on the disk physical structure. We combined some pretty advanced chemical modelling (Catherine) with a benchmarked model of the disk (Jenny).

Our first surprising result was than the methanol was cold (~35K) suggesting it wasn’t coming from thermal desorption of ices on dust grains, but instead by non-thermal processes. This led us to start looking more into how it could be formed chemically.

We can look at the relative intensities of each of these transitions to pull out physical information like excitation temperature and column density for the methanol gas, and since the observations were spatially resolved, we can look at how these change radially through the disk.

Methanol is the starting point for lots of important prebiotic chemistry. So far it has only been detected in a disk around one solar-type star, TW Hya. We used #ALMA to go back and get some very sensitive, high-resolution observations of multiple transitions for the first time.