Thomas Beatty

Image with a blue to purple gradient in the background with graphics of a planet, sunset on water, DNA & an Erlenmeyer flask, with text "WiCOR seeks a Postdoctoral Fellow, Apply by Nov 15, Learn more at wicor.wisc.edu/postdoc"

WiCOR seeks a #postdoctoral fellow to participate in Center #research in any discipline related to our two main research questions:
1. How do habitable planets form? 🪐
2. How does life emerge on habitable planets? 🧬

Full information at: wicor.wisc.edu/postdoc/

Apply by Nov 15

🔭 🧪
#postdoc #hiring

Serious comment to anyone on the JSTUC or who works on APT: can we *please* get a version that updates in place? Every other piece of software I work with can do this.

Fishing! All the kids involved managed to catch something (thankfully!).

Of course a cursory review of Juno's technical specs show the engine has a less-efficient specific impulse of 318s, and it has already expended at least 1/5 of its fuel for Jupiter orbit-insertion (to say nothing of maneuvers since then).

According to these calculations, Juno could just do a flyby 3I/ATLAS assuming the spacecraft's engine has a specific impulse of 340s and uses its entire fuel load.

Intercepting 3I/ATLAS at Closest Approach to Jupiter with the Juno spacecraft The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is expected to arrive at a distance of $53.56(\pm 0.45)$ million ${\rm km}$ ($0.358\pm 0.003$~au) from Jupiter on March 16, 2026. We show that applying a total thrust ...

arxiv.org/abs/2507.21402

Yeah, not possible.

This July 4, remember that the US is the only country whose national anthem ends in a question.

How some of my Zoom calls feel:

Congratulations Dr. Matthew Murphy! Matthew is off to Michigan State next year to work on a great JWST atmospheres project with @afeinstein20.bsky.social.

The Larry Meiller Show Join us every weekday from 11:00 to 1:00 when we discuss the environment, consumer issues, nature, books, gardening, home improvement and so much more. Our expert guests share their knowledge and take...

Jim Lattis and I will be on Madison's local NPR affiliate tomorrow afternoon from noon - 1pm, as a part of the Larry Meiller Show.

We'll talk about exoplanets, the search for life, and the new WiCOR center at UW.

Locals can listen on FM 88.7, or online www.wpr.org/shows/larry-...

The NASA RIF Has Begun This was just sent to the NASA workforce:

nasawatch.com/ask-the-admi...

"We will close NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, the Office of the Chief Scientist, and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility branch in the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, along with reducing their workforce."

Graphic of a computer showing the WiCOR website on the screen with the WiCOR logo and text "Visit the WiCOR website! wicor.wisc.edu" above.

The WiCOR Website has launched! 🚀

Visit the site to learn all about WiCOR! 🧪🔭

wicor.wisc.edu

Voyager scene. Seven of Nine (tertiary adjunct of unimatrix 01) is pictured. She has a dolphin shaped metal robotic implant around her left eye because she is a borgs. Closed caption reads, "Fun will now commence."

It's the weekend, baby

I will say this highlights the wisdom of how NASA was created 60 years ago: by placing the centers all over the country, we end up with a lot of members of Congress across party lines (like the Alabama delegation) who don't want things cut.

Even if day to day it feels inefficient.

The bill passed last night had funding levels through 2034, and (on my quick skim) they looked roughly constant in current dollars.

But you're right that even if the 250 funding makes it through mostly intact this year, we all get to keep doing this.

So cautious optimism about overall levels, and it seems like the scenario of a 50% budget cut to NSF and no new awards this year may be prevented.

The budget bill passed last night allocated about $43 billion next year for Function 250, which covers NASA, NSF, and DOE Science. That's only about $1 billion less than the previous FY25 budget from last summer.

The Wisconsin Center for Origins Research Logo which depicts a spiral galaxy converging to form a strand of DNA.

Hello from the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research!
👋🧪🔭

WiCOR’s Mission is to advance our understanding of the #OriginsOfLife in the #Universe through interdisciplinary #research and #education.

Follow us to stay updated on all things WiCOR!
linktr.ee/wicenterforo...

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, —
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!

Ice skating! I like that Madison's parks clear off big sections of the ponds and run skate rental booths.

I'm pleased (?) to report that my school-based stress dream has now switched from "arrive on the last day of class for the final exam and realize you haven't attended all semester" to the alternate version of "arrive on the first day of class and realize you haven't prepared anything."

A Pair of Dynamically Interacting Sub-Neptunes Around TOI-6054 We confirm the planetary nature of a pair of transiting sub-Neptune exoplanets orbiting the bright F-type sub-giant star TOI-6054 ($V=8.02$, $K=6.673$) as a part of the OrCAS radial velocity survey us...

Check out grad student Max Kroft's new paper on TOI-6054: two dynamically interacting sub-Neptunes (both ~ 10 M_E) around a bright (K=6.7) sub-giant. The star has started evolving - so the inner planet has gone from a life of leisure to strong mass-loss in the last few Myr.

arxiv.org/abs/2501.09095

In particular, one wild card is that if there is a lot of vertical mixing like in Luis and David's papers, the usual silicates might be still in the mix (harhar). In principle an eclipse would see that easily and help resolve a lot of the uncertainties in the modeling that complicate the analysis

Matthew's paper has a discussion about this, with KCl as the most likely possibility ("evidence for KCl") but not for sure since, as you note, traditionally there are no KCl features here (a "detection of KCl").

A dayside emission spectrum with MIRI would help clear (harhar) this up - hopefully!

BUT, the clouds on W107 (if that's what they are) are a bit of a puzzle, since Dryek+23 originally saw SiO2. That sort of works, but the overall feature is very broad.

KCl is pretty much the only "reasonable" thing that has a condensation curve crossing the GCMs' TP profiles at the right places to be there at morning but not at evening. And Kiefer+24 recently suggested that you could get distinct features in the W107 MIRI data using heterogenous cloud particles.

Sadly, no. It's sort of metallic. It's not a ... good smell.