Duncan Christie

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.

If you want know all things #HabitableWorldsObservatory then follow @drjovian.bsky.social for the next two days as she posts from the #HWO25 meeting in Washington DC.
Thanks Jo for keeping us posted ☺️

This is very cool.

A deep Search for Ethylene Glycol and Glycolonitrile in the V883 Ori Protoplanetary Disk Ethylene glycol ($\mathrm{(CH_2OH)_2}$, hereafter EG) and Glycolonitrile ($\mathrm{HOCH_2CN}$, hereafter GN) are considered molecular precursors of nucleic acids. EG is a sugar alcohol and the reduced...

My student Abubakar Fadul's most recent paper is now on arXiv! He found evidence of ethylene glycol (aka antifreeze) and glycolonitrile in a protoplanetary disk. If confirmed, these will be the most complex organics seen in a disk! 🔭🧪☄️ arxiv.org/abs/2507.14905

Happy to share the first paper from the SPACE Program, led by my student Angelique Kahle! she observed a hot little sub-Neptune, HD 86226c (Rp = 2.3 Re; equilibrium temp = 1300 K). arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13439

The spectrum is *really* flat ! here's the amplitude compared to other gaseous planets.

The dark forest hypothesis ("The galaxy seems quiet because #aliens fear being attacked if they are noisy.") is stupid. A thread apropos of absolutely nothing, totally.

Kodak, when confronted with the rise of digital photography, went big on investments in…film.

Which is why you don’t hear about Kodak anymore.

In a related dynamic, the United States, when confronted with the rise of clean energy, went big on investments in… oil.

Geometric Considerations in Hot Jupiter Magnetic Drag Models Magnetic fields are expected to impact the atmospheric dynamics of hot and ultra-hot Jupiters due to their increased ionization fractions, compared to that of cooler exoplanets, but our ability to mod...

My paper with Tom Evans-Soma and Nathan Mayne on magnetic drag models is now accepted and up on the arXiv. For a quick summary, look at the PDF of my Exoclimes poster that I shared last week.

www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.08511

We all need to be more thoughtful about where we put our money. If you're giving $10/month to a left-wing podcast/streamer/etc. who has limited expenses but makes $100k+/month from donations, you can probably safely divert your money to ProPublica, etc., and get better results for your money.

MAXMINDS 2.0 Homepage MAXMINDS 2.0

It is with great pleasure that I share MAXMINDS 2.0, a new Max Planck program to support scholars in danger of displacement by war or natural disasters, and who have limited access to resources and institutional support.

If you know affected scholars, please share.

www.maxminds.mpg.de

Yeah, I understand it's not really reasonable to accommodate processing times like this. I'm glad that you're open to considering these issues for future meetings.

Excited to be at Exoclimes (@exoclimes.bsky.social) this week! Come find me at poster 139 🪐

I'm building a retrieval framework to help make sense of variability in brown dwarfs and directly imaged planets.

Come say hi, and we can nerd out about variable atmospheres 😊

As I sit at Exoclimes listening to a Zoom talk from the UK, I thought I'd share this again. When choosing where to host international meetings, we need to consider the ability of attendees to get visas in a timely manner.

Since many people can't make it to Exoclimes, here is my poster looking at the geometry of magnetic drag models in hot Jupiter atmospheres. There are many caveats about the applicability of these models, but they're a first step in including dayside coupling.
www.duncanchristie.net/s/exoclimes_...

Huge congratulations to @sophiavaughan.bsky.social for receiving the Michael Penston Prize from the RAS!!! Sophia is a pioneer in detecting reflected light from exoplanets. Congrats on this well-deserved recognition 😁🔭

Three-dimensional Transport-induced Chemistry on Temperate sub-Neptune K2-18b, Part I: the Effects of Atmospheric Dynamics The low equilibrium temperatures of temperate sub-Neptunes lead to extremely long chemical timescales in their upper atmospheres, causing the abundances of chemical species to be strongly shaped by at...

My new paper, co-authored with Duncan Christie and Jun Yang, on 3D chemical kinetics simulations of K2-18b has been accepted by MNRAS!
This is Part I of a series. In Part I, we examine the planet's atmospheric dynamics and its impact on the transport of passive tracers.
arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891

Three-dimensional Transport-induced Chemistry on Temperate sub-Neptune K2-18b, Part I: the Effects of Atmospheric Dynamics The low equilibrium temperatures of temperate sub-Neptunes lead to extremely long chemical timescales in their upper atmospheres, causing the abundances of chemical species to be strongly shaped by at...

Jiachen Liu (@jiachenliu.bsky.social) has a very interesting paper out where she looks at the dynamics of K2-18b, modelled as a mini-Neptune.

www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.23891

I've had multiple non-science people genuinely tell me that all of the American scientific workforce will be absorbed by other countries and...no, people. If we want to keep science at the level it's been at, we need to save US science.

In the face of anti-science politics, silence is not without cost More scientific leaders need to speak out about anti-science agendas and threats to academic freedom across the world.

Important editorial in @nature.com.
As I said a decade ago in an op-ed in the @nytimes.com (back when they were publishing stuff like that), "If You See Something, Say Something" (www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/o...)
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We need to be better about where we have conferences.

Visitor visa processing times for Canada, by country where you are applying from:

Germany/Austria: 315d
UK: 343d

Citizens of these countries are visa-exempt, but many researchers who aren't visa-exempt live there. As a Canadian about to head to Canada for a conference, I'm embarrassed.

Osiris revisited: Confirming a solar metallicity and low C/O in HD 209458b HD 209458b is the prototypical hot Jupiter and one of the best targets available for precise atmosphere characterisation. Now that spectra from both Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space T...

Super proud of Nora Bachmann for her first first-author paper, a deep dive into the classic hot Jupiter, HD 209458b! arxiv.org/abs/2506.16232

I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future.

But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.

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