Ward Howard

Do you have any idea if someone over 50 who has a very high VO2 max is in less danger?

How do you feel about Von Daniken's influence on the Stargate franchise?

Transient phase space showing radio luminosity versus the product of timescale and observing frequency for different transient source classes, following Cordes et al. (2004). This is a figure from Murphy & Kaplan (2025) published in PASA. See the paper text (Figure 1 caption) for a full description.

The final version of our Dawes Review on the Dynamic Radio Sky is now published!

doi.org/10.1017/pasa...

Everything you need to know about what causes radio transients: how we detect them, the history of radio transient surveys, and what new widefield radio telescopes will do.

#RadioAstronomy 🔭☄️🧪

At least for Argus and DSA, Nick and Gregg have been building and testing hardware for years.

"The plan is to freely and openly share data from the telescopes. The Schmidts have emphasized that this is not a commercial project in any way. They will not be selling time on the telescopes. Rather, there will be an open competition for the best scientific ideas and observations to make." -Berger

Two things have happened: the community hasn't reassembled to the same degree here, and that lots of astro groups are now internally using Slack and Discord for discussions instead of social media. That's pretty much killed it off, IMHO.

Not sure -- I'd email the organizers to explain your situation and ask for a one-year extension on the dissertation talk eligibility?

Dropping this here without comment

Astronomers Have Discovered the Pleiades’ Secret Stellar Family The “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades are part of a much larger complex that can help reveal our galaxy’s deep history

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Excellent coverage of a major result from our team! 🧪🔭 @sciam.bsky.social

This is … extremely … accurate. I think you had those glasses when we got lunch in Feb

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And that light is true life 🎄✨

…and she reconnects with old flame who runs a struggling newspace launch provider hoping to be the next SpaceX but without a viable business plan and running out of capital

Compared to the other names in the running, I'm not sure we could have reasonably gotten a better one to survive the current administration?

My first time as instructor of record I had to pivot our final exam from in person to remote due to a bomb threat that shut down campus.

I wonder how many LLM-assisted proposals one submitter could churn out? Lower quality proposals, but it’s a strategy I guess?

Separating flare and secondary atmospheric signals with RADYN modeling of near-infrared JWST transmission spectroscopy observations of TRAPPIST-1 Although TRAPPIST-1's temperate planets have the highest transmission signals of any known system, flares contaminate 50-70% of transits at the 1000 ppm level, far above 100 ppm secondary atmospheres....

9/ And arXiv link is live: arxiv.org/abs/2512.04265

Thanks! That's my hypothesis, too. It'll take joint JWST and HST monitoring to confirm whether UV counterparts are indeed wimpy. Happy to discuss that more over email 😉

Spectral residuals after flare correction in the top panels, and sensitivity to exoplanet atmospheric signal strength from injection-testing in the bottom panels.

8/ We also use our flare spectral models to correct the flare-contaminated observations to levels comparable to the expected signals of secondary planetary atmospheres using a RADYN-based and more empirical pipeline, both of which retrieve ~130 ppm injected CO2 atmospheres with a Bayes Factor of 3.

Left: predictions of an IR flare's X-ray and UV counterparts. Right: We scale the JWST-measured flare rate into X-ray, UV, and optical bandpasses using these model predictions.

7/ Since the same beams producing JWST flares also cause X-ray/UV emission important to understanding planetary atmospheres, we make testable predictions for future multiwavelength observations. If true, these predictions give flare impacts for 260 hours of archival JWST data lacking joint X-ray/UV!

6/ Excitingly, the electron beams identified by separate grid searches on the NIRISS flare lines and continuum largely agree, providing evidence for only moderate-intensity electron beams of 10^12 erg/s/cm^2 and low electron energies of 20-40 keV. This may help explain the cooler flare temperatures!

5/ The new RADYN models in arxiv.org/abs/2404.13214 span four orders of magnitude in electron beam properties (i.e. electron flux, energy, and power-law index), which enabled our grid searches to identify the beams that likely produced the TRAPPIST-1 infrared flares for the first time.

4/ Flares occur when magnetic fields accelerate beams of electrons down into the stellar atmosphere, heating the plasma. RADYN is unique in its ability to model this electron beam heating. Until now, RADYN models have been unable to reproduce the low flare temperatures of the TRAPPIST flare spectra:

3/ Journal link here: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Top: flare timeseries color-coded by infrared-wavelength flare temperature. Bottom: typical flare spectra and residuals for representative temperatures.

2/ Our results, published in ApJ Letters just prior to the holidays, rely on 5.5 hours of mostly NIRISS observations obtained during six large "X-class" flares from TRAPPIST-1 observed as part of GO 2589 (PI: Lim) and GTO 1201 (Lafrenière). Flare temperatures during these times are highlighted:

New research on flares from a hot-tempered star could inform search for habitable planets A new study takes a close look at TRAPPIST-1, a little star roughly 40 light-years from our sun that hosts seven Earth-sized planets.

1/ It's press day!🔭🧪 We apply a grid of time-dependent physical models to explain TRAPPIST-1 flares, predicting the X-ray & UV flux driving escape and photochemistry in planetary atmospheres, and correcting flare contamination in transit spectroscopy down to ~60 ppm:
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/1...

I was meeting ahead of class with a student to discuss accommodations when they started describing this happening to them in a previous course-- yikes!

To quote Galileo, "It is the Holy Spirit's intention to teach us how to go to heaven, and not how the heavens go." Both astrology and certain religious fundamentalists very much claim to teach how the heavens go, and I reject both as unhelpful.

I’m gonna try the Apple Pie 17 Max Pro 😂

B jokes come in all stripes!

Voyager needs to avoid Vidiian space?
Problematic phage gap.