Duncan Christie

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US.
𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕.
𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

US Astronomy Graduate Admissions, AY 2025-2026

Are you someone who is interested in astronomy graduate school? This is a list of many/most departments and their expectations for admissions this year. Please feel free to spread it far and wide. If you are doing admissions and you'd like to update your entry, reach out as per the form!

I think for me the most compelling answer for "why fund basic research?" (and the one most relevant to the people doing the work) is that humans are curious and finding stuff out makes us happy and fulfilled. Science is a thing humans like. Life would be more dull and sad if we didn't do it.

end/🧵

Eclipse Mapping with Ariel: Future Prospects for a Population-Level Mapping Survey Eclipse mapping is a powerful tool for measuring 3D profiles of exoplanet atmospheres. To date, only JWST has been capable of widely applying this technique, but as a general observatory, it is too ti...

New paper alert 🔔 If you like eclipse mapping and are excited for the future opportunities that Ariel will provide, then check it out!

(Bonus: writing an eclipse mapping proposal? We've ranked all the best eclipse mapping targets for both Ariel and JWST!)

arxiv.org/abs/2510.03147

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

🚨🚨 My dear friend and fellow academic, the Palestinian American sociologist @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social has been taken by the Cook County Sheriff near Chicago. They have not mirandized her. Please signal boost. All eyes on Broadview for Eman and the community she was defending 🚨🚨

Bayesian Model Comparison and Significance: Widespread Errors and how to Correct Them Bayes factors have become a popular tool in exoplanet spectroscopy for testing atmosphere models against one another. We show that the commonly used method for converting these values into significanc...

You know, this might be important.

"Bayesian Model Comparison and Significance: Widespread Errors and how to Correct Them"

www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.00169

It also provides an opportunity to catch obvious errors, and to force authors to actually provide details of what they are doing in their models. The last one frustrates me the most, as people cite arXiv postings with limited explanation of how they arrived at their results.

Within my field, I think the some of the papers that get posted to arXiv on submission are lacking in a lot of details and occasionally change a lot by the time they are accepted, but it is the posted version that everyone reads and presumably has in their mind when they are citing the paper.

Ohio State just advised all staff and students not to attend the SACNAS (Society for the advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) annual meeting of 6000+ scientists -- which is in Columbus, OH this year! -- saying it may be exclusionary, even though it is open to all.

As this is my work account where I post about exoplanetary science, that is the community which I am concerned with, and the community to which I was referring. I completely agree that other fields may have reasons to do things differently, but why would not think that I am referring to my field?

I'm not sure how the definitive 'No' is aligned with doing what works best for my community.

Normalize submitting to arXiv after acceptance instead of on submission.

🔭 It's paper day! Today I'm sharing the latest in a series of papers looking at the weather on other worlds, in this case bringing you the weather report from a nearby T-dwarf, SIMP-0136. 🪐

🧵 to follow...

YouTube video by BOWIE+ Seminars Demystifying the Sub-Neptune Frontier with JWST by Anjali Piette

Dr. Anjali Piette of the University of Birmingham gave a wonderful talk on connecting sub-Neptune atmospheres to their interiors as a part of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series. The video is now available on Youtube. #exoplanets #astronomy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrT...

YouTube video by BOWIE+ Seminars How to Observe 3D Atmospheres for Impatient Exoplaneteers by Michael Radica

As a part of the soft launch of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series in July, Dr. Michael Radica gave a talk on how we discern the three dimensional structure of exoplanet atmospheres from observations. The video is now available. #exoplanets #astronomy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOw7...

We are slowly building up the Youtube presence, but details about the seminar series can be found on our website.

bowiecollaboration.github.io/seminars.html

The answer is always to publicly claim you chose work-life balance by taking a nap while actually working on your grant proposal the entire time.

YouTube video by BOWIE+ Seminars Atmospheres on Rocky Exoplanets by Ryan Macdonald

As a part of the launch of the BOWIE+ Seminar Series, Dr. Ryan MacDonald (@distantworlds.space) gave a great overview of our current understanding of rocky worlds thanks to JWST. The talk is now up on Youtube if you're interested. #exoplanets #astronomy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN3y...

A rocky planet in its star’s ‘habitable zone’ could be the first known to have an atmosphere – here’s what we found The largest telescope in space has been trained on a rocky exoplanet.

We observed the habitable zone planet TRAPPIST-1e with JWST to search for an atmosphere.

You've seen the headlines, now let's dive into the science! 🧪

THREAD (1/N)

#Exoplanets 🔭

The Astrosky Ecosystem - Open Collective We're building an open-source ecosystem of social media tools for the space science & astronomy communities.

For the last two years, I've been paying for the Astronomy feeds hosting myself.

It has been a privilege to grow our community here, but I also shouldn't keep doing it for free 😅

That's why I'm delighted to announce that we now have a donations page on Open Collective! 🔭☄️ #astrophotography

It also excuses a lack of creativity on the part of conference organizers. We should be looking to find venues/locations that satisfy the priorities you listed while still offering a good experience for the participants.

I completely agree that conferences should prioritize sustainability, affordability, as well as inclusivity, but I'm not sure that describing the solution as "the most boring possible venues & places" helps. Boring means different things to different people.

Most importantly, it looks like this release gets rid of the "consult your local theorist" message for non-solar metallicities.

Article on BBC news. Title: AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs Description: Two new potential drugs have been designed by AI to kill drug-resistant bacteria, in a major Massachusetts Institute of Technology study.

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪

The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs.

That is *pure fantasy*.

Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grown accustomed Teasing the public with fraudulent or self-deluded promises of aliens used to mean something. It took work. It meant slapping together…

I have a complaint about Avi Loeb's latest work and I want to speak to management.

medium.com/@steve.desch...

I am a professional astrophysicist working on exoplanets.

yes

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Avi Loeb has gotten US Rep Luna to write NASA admin Duffy with a demand to repurpose Juno to rendezvous with 3I/Atlas. This is so far out of line I don't know where to start.