Robin Wordsworth

I've stuck a few more here:

people.seas.harvard.edu/~rwordsworth...

The CO rotational band makes a nice bass. Ozone is straight out of 60's Star Trek. And ammonia and water are terrifying.

yes, collision broadening is included

Cool, thanks for sharing!

What does a molecule sound like? We all learn in high school chemistry or earlier that atoms can bind together to form molecules, and like a " highly sophisticated interlock...

🧪 I'm a fan of this way of interacting with vibrational spectra. I did this on my blog a while ago: nanoscale.blogspot.com/2015/06/what...

If you could hear in the infrared, what would CO2 sound like? We calculated this recently for a Gen Ed course, and the result is a little eerie.

Results were generated by mapping IR frequency in inverse cm to sound frequency in Hz.

U.S. Pulls Back from Quest to Confirm Cosmic Inflation Researchers hoped CMB-S4, a $900-million cosmology experiment, would answer one of the greatest questions in physics. Instead it’s become another cautionary tale of pursuing big science amid shrinking...

Now on @sciam.bsky.social, by @nadiadrake.bsky.social:

The U.S. has axed CMB-S4, its boldest cosmology experiment in generations. Tight budgets and crumbling infrastructure helped doom the project, which was meant to test cosmic inflation. RIP.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

Ancient rocks show earliest evidence of tectonic activity on Earth The origins of plate tectonics on Earth are hotly debated, but evidence from Australia now shows that parts of the crust moved in relation to each other as early as 3.5 billion years ago

Direct evidence for tectonics (of some kind!) 3.5B years ago. The timeline keeps moving back. Nice find by @alexwilkins.bsky.social at Goldschmidt.

Bioplastic habitats on Mars could be built from algae A lab experiment that simulated Mars conditions showed that green algae can grow in plastic containers made from the same algae, setting the stage for a self-sustaining system to build habitats on the planet

A lab experiment that simulated Mars conditions showed that green algae can grow in plastic containers made from the same algae, setting the stage for a self-sustaining system to build habitats on the planet.

Thanks! Our simulations aren't quite in the same regime as Venus, but we separately used the model to recreate Venus's temperature profile and it did pretty well. We found it was right on the edge of convective instability in Venus's lower atmosphere, interestingly.

Convective shutdown in the atmospheres of lava worlds Atmospheric energy transport is central to the cooling of primordial magma oceans. Theoretical studies of atmospheres on lava planets have assumed that convection is the only process involved in setti...

On a related note, we found that convective shutdown by the same mechanism can drastically shorten primordial magma ocean freeze-out times, though with enough irradiation there can be persistent magma oceans despite convective shutdown. arxiv.org/abs/2412.11987

I mean yeah pretty worried, of course : ). The problem with the continuum in the visible is that we need really long path lengths and/or sensitive measurements, which means $$$ for experiments. Maybe ab initio can help, although H2O is a tough molecule to simulate.

New work led by Jess Cmiel finds that planets with steam atmospheres may be cooler — much cooler — at the surface than we previously thought.



iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

arxiv.org/abs/2505.00775

This supports and extends conclusions published last year by Selsis et al. in Nature. 🔭 🧪

ROCKY WORLDS 4 - Abstract Submission Abstract submission & conference registration Abstract submission and conference registration are done in two steps. First, the abstract submission below (including requests for financial support) run...

The abstract submission for Rocky Worlds 4 is now open! groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/registration... 🌋🔭🧬😱

The resurfacing is very episodic but it’d still be pretty bad in a period of peak activity. Then in the good times you’d have slimy microbial mats as far as the eye could see. No skyr or harðfiskur, unfortunately.

It's a fascinating question. Global temperature matters a lot, but so do other factors like total area and latitude (equatorial LIPs weather fastest due to higher rainfall rates). If e.g. Brazil was turned into a LIP today, that could well trigger a Snowball.

These ‘large igneous provinces’ have formed a few times in Earth history and are terrifying — imagine a huge chunk of the surface turning into Mordor in a geologic blink of the eye

What does it take to turn Earth into a Snowball? Formation of a volcanic plateau about the size of India at the equator, according to our new study led by Charlotte Minsky:

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🔭 🧪

Interesting paper by Yang et al. on arxiv today arguing clouds might _help_ us observe O2/O3 on exoplanets in some cases:

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07760

Proposed NASA cuts in context, courtesy of the Planetary Society #astronomy #science

The Planetary Society condemns deep, damaging 24% cut to NASA’s budget The Planetary Society strongly opposes the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget blueprint, which proposes a 24% reduction to NASA’s top-line funding. This…

www.planetary.org/press-releas...

very happy to chat if you're interested in working on this!

yes, we include atmosphere-mantle interaction, although only the magma ocean phase for the moment. things get complicated once the melt solidifies!

This all feels very on topic for Earth Day

Thanks! The point is that if we want to use O2 as a biosignature, we first need to understand how abiotic planets evolve, which means starting with the hot close-in targets.

Sub-Neptunes shrink and oxidize as they cross the radius valley and become rocky planets, in a new paper led by Collin Cherubim

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05055
#astronomy #science

Research Funding The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government...

www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

Limited hysteresis in the atmospheric dynamics of hot Jupiters Over the past two decades, a coherent picture has emerged of the atmospheric dynamics of hot Jupiters from a combination of three-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs) and astronomical observa...

I'm excited to announce that my first solo-author paper has been accepted at ApJ: arxiv.org/abs/2502.19394. I study the dependence of hot Jupiter circulation on both the temperature and wind initial conditions building upon Liu & Showman (2013), finding that the circulation of typical HJ is robust.

The Planetary Society Strongly Opposes Mass Layoffs of Probationary… Sudden, indiscriminate layoffs at NASA do not serve the national interests in space leadership.

The Planetary Society strongly opposes the sudden, indiscriminate dismissal of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and explorers at NASA — the largest involuntary workforce reduction since the end of the Apollo program.

Read more on our stance. ⬇️

Episodic warm climates on early Mars primed by crustal hydration - Nature Geoscience Photochemical modelling suggests that H2 outgassing from crustal hydration could have supported transient warming episodes on early Mars in a CO2-rich atmosphere with abrupt transitions to cold climat...

Our new Nature Geoscience paper led by Danica Adams is now published:

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

Water-rock chemistry released hydrogen and helped make early Mars habitable to microbial life.

We'll be able to test this idea directly once we can study Mars rocks here on Earth.

Our new paper led by Jake Seeley on clouds and convection in H2-dominated atmospheres is out! Technical conclusion: Things get weird when nitrogen is no longer the background gas 🧪🔭

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
arxiv.org/abs/2412.06648