Philip Muirhead

Congratulations to Dr. Allison McCarthy, who successfully defended her PhD “The Physical Basis for L and T Dwarf Variability” on Friday! Allie is now off to Trinity College Dublin for a postdoc with the ExoAimsir group led by Prof. Johanna Vos! 🪐🔭 @alliemccarthy.bsky.social @johannavos.bsky.social

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget:

- Cuts to every science division
- Smallest science funding since 1984
- 19 active, inflight missions cancelled
- Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

I've used the Allan Deviation once. I think I did it right (Eq 15)?? Though I didn't cite Allan... My bad. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Congrats to my colleague Merav Opher on winning a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship! And congrats to BU for tying with Princeton for the most Guggenheim fellows this year (6)!

Students and faculty in a colloquium room.

Thank you to our Perkins-Telescope-partner North Carolina A&T @ncatsuaggies.bsky.social for hosting me for their Physics Colloquium this week! I had a wonderful time meeting with their undergrads, grad students, and faculty, and talking about small stars, brown dwarfs and exoplanets!

Check out our newest results from JWST, led by @alliemccarthy.bsky.social and published today in ApJ Letters! 🔭🪐

Check out the press release for our recent work using JWST observations of SIMP0136! Also published today on ApJL: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Excited to share this press release of our investigation into the atmosphere of a "rogue planet"!

Hugo Ballin Murals - Griffith Observatory - Southern California’s gateway to the cosmos! On the vaulted ceiling and upper walls of the W. M. Keck Foundation Central Rotunda are Griffith Observatory's greatest artistic treasure: the Hugo Ballin Murals. Workers have carefully and completely...

Recently forwarded an article by @griffithobserv.bsky.social about the unknown telescope in Hugo Ballin's mural in their rotunda. Turns out it's BU's own Perkins Telescope! A "modern telescope" that we still think is pretty modern 😇 griffithobservatory.org/exhibits/w-m...

In Lewis Lapham’s last Notebook for Harper’s, he wrote that reading history “lessons our fears of what might happen tomorrow.” Wow, was he wrong about that.

A label maker sitting in a kitchen counter.

It’s my birthday and my wife got me a label maker 😍 You can probably guess my age from how happy I am about this gift.

My first thought: Must be intensity interferometry because there’s no way they are beam combining that many telescopes, unless each is heterodyned with an LFC and amp/phase written to disk. [Reads acronym, looks at poster]🤦‍♂️

Image of the "Eclipse" exhibit at the Reflections of Light event at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

We went on Tuesday! That was such a cool experience. (Family in silhouette.)

Really hoping the Social Security Fairness Act passes the Senate this week. My mom lives on a meager Texas teacher’s pension (below poverty earnings) but can’t collect her or my late father’s social security from their non-govt work because of the GPO provision. SSFA would fix that!

Congrats Kevin!

The JWST Weather Report from the Isolated Exoplanet Analog SIMP 0136+0933: Pressure-Dependent Variability Driven by Multiple Mechanisms Isolated planetary-mass objects share their mass range with planets but do not orbit a star. They lack the necessary mass to support fusion in their cores and thermally radiate their heat from formati...

Check out BU PhD-student @alliemccarthy.bsky.social's paper just accepted to ApJL! JWST spectral light curves of SIMP 0136 show clear pressure-dependence, indicating three variability mechanisms: clouds, hot spots and C chemistry. @johannavos.bsky.social is the JWST PI! arxiv.org/abs/2411.16577

Another paper from our BU-RIT-UToronto collaboration on benchmark post common envelope binaries (close white dwarf + main sequence stars). Graduating UToronto PhD student Steffani Grondin's catalog of PCEBs in open clusters is published! www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/astronomers-...

🔭🧪

Pro tip: If you are writing NSF proposals and can't upload it because research(dot)gov says you don't have a broader impacts section, when most definitely do have a broader impacts section, try moving your figures further from the broader impacts heading.

Runner holding his daughter while she eats a sandwich after a race.

Not sure how many New England Falls we have left on this planet, but yesterday's Boston Half Marathon could not have been nicer.

Several years ago I sent a random message to a generic NASA inquires email about WORF on the ISS for a possible experiment. Don Pettit replied and sent a photo…from space.

Every department has one. Or several. Or all 😂

I keep forgetting to add to the feeds! Let's see if this works: 🔭🪐

Caeley Pittman giving her talk at Cool Stars 22.

Allie McCarthy giving her talk at Cool Stars 22.

Great talks at Cool Stars 22 by BU PhD students Caeley Pittman and Allie McCarthy!

Allison McCarthy standing in front of her poster at Exoplanets V.

If you missed BU-PhD-student Allie McCarthy's awesome weather-app-inspired poster at Exoplanets V, you can catch the TALK version at Cool Stars 22 on Monday!

Man and baby in front of a large tall ship.

The third largest tall ship in the world is currently a block from my apartment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish...

Sir George Dyson KCVO (28 May 1883 – 28 September 1964) was an English musician and composer. After studying at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London, a... George Dyson - Symphony (1937)

Thanks to a college friend for pointing me to George Dyson's Symphony in G. I had no idea Freeman Dyson's father was a (knighted) composer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3-a...

Clues to a crossword puzzle with "Equivalent of ten million ergs per second" circled.

Hey I know that one.

My sense is that NASA planetary awards are kinder to research faculty, with larger total awards to cover them and students/postdocs (eg PME’s can add millions to a standard planetary award). NASA astrophysics awards (including most XRPs) are generally smaller.

Tobie the Turkey settles in in Charlestown Mack Garvey reports Tobie the Turkey seems to have made a home along Tremont Street in Charlestown, near the Tobin Bridge. Read more.

Apparently another neighbor beat me to it and named her Tobie, after the nearby Tobin Bridge: www.universalhub.com/2024/tobie-t...