Sam Morrell

Delighted to be able to share our latest #ALAN journal article. We use our radiative transfer model to simulate in 3D the street lighting of the city of #Exeter and probe its environmental and ecological effects at metre scales.

The spatiotemporal extent of #ALAN is decreasing, but becoming bluer.

RAS logo on a purple starry background.

📣 Are you an RAS Fellow or Friend? 📣

We're calling on our members to help force the Government to reconsider its proposed cuts to astronomy and space science, which would be the most drastic in a generation.

Send our template letter to your MP and seek their support 👉️ ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Wonderful writing on the proposed catastrophic cuts to UK curiosity-led research. This type of research is one thing the UK is currently genuinely excellent at

I hope the government can be convinced that knowing the price of everything doesn't mean you know the value of anything

🧪🔭⚛️

It's been a pleasure working with the council, and applying our modelling techniques, developed in-house at @exeter.ac.uk, and expertise to contribute a piece of the puzzle for this. I'm looking forward to sharing a recently accepted journal paper that we did alongside this work soon.

Council to make decision over future of Devon street light trial Devon County Council says a decision over whether to make the trial permanent will be made in 2026.

Good news! #Devon County Council have implemented part-night lighting and dimming for their streetlights. This provides money and carbon savings, but also reduced temporal and spatial extent of #ALAN, likely reducing ecological pressure on organisms at nighttime.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Current opportunities | Astrophysics | University of Exeter

Anyone looking for an #astrophysics #PhD? Particularly in the #SouthWest of the #UK? My colleagues in the Astrophysics Group at @universityofexeter.bsky.social are advertising funded PhD projects now. Please reach out if you're interested and would like more info.

www.exeter.ac.uk/research/gro...

Myself and @asborlaff.bsky.social feature on the Nature Podcast chatting about this paper on planned satellite constellations and their impact on astronomical research.

We are also very concerned about satellites impacting star gazing for everyone and losing the shared wilderness of the night sky.

I'm really excited to get this #paper into the world. A huge thanks to my co-authors on this work for sticking with this project, and for all of their hard work and contributions.

Read here: doi.org/10.1093/mnra...

#astrophysics #astro #astronomy #science #stars

We also perform a quantitative study of systematics (e.g. extinction, metallicity, and stellar activity) and show that the systematic error in both stellar radius and temperature are comparable to or less than the random uncertainty.

Our revised exoplanet radii and masses (top), along with a comparison to the literature values presented in TEPCat (bottom), measured in percentage difference.

Planetary radius measurements in literature have uncertainties about 40% larger than we measure in this work.

The attached plot shows the revised #exoplanet radius and mass, along with the difference between ours and those in #TEPCat (astro.keele.ac.uk/jkt/tepcat/).

A plot showing synthetic minus observed Gaia photometry. The literature measurements and errorbars are shown in blue, and those from our work in red. Our measurements show a smaller scatter, and smaller errorbars.

Our stellar radii have uncertainties of about 2%, and we measure stellar temperatures to around 50K.

Using synthetic #Gaia #DR3 G-band photometry, our parameters show a factor of 10 reduction in RMS residual and nearly a 40% improvement in mean uncertainty, when compared to the literature.

Our revised exoplanet host parameters, shown in temperature-radius space, along with their 68% confidence contours. We also overlay a number of isochrones from Dotter et al. (2008), and the M-dwarf Temperature-Radius relationship we derived from our 2018 paper (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gateway/2019MNRAS.489.2615M/doi:10.1093/mnras/stz2242).

In this article, we use SED fitting to re-derive the fundamental parameters of known #exoplanet hosting #stars. We also use literature data, or in some cases fitting of new #TESS #transit data, to re-derive #exoplanet properties.

It's new paper day! This time #astrophysics.
🌟 doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf2063 🌟

This paper was originally a chapter of my thesis. But since then, thanks many years of sharpening thinking, and the incredible work of my co-authors, it has taken on a life all of its own.

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

On the night of Jan. 29, I remotely observed the
Gaia
spacecraft using the SPIRIT 3 telescope at
@icrar.bsky.social's Mardella Observatory (IAU code E29). Farewell to this incredible mission that revolutionized our understanding of the Milky Way!
#Gaia #GBOT #astro

everyone this week

A huge congratulations to @stellarplanet.bsky.social. An incredibly well deserved honour indeed! 😀

Congrats to astronomers Wendy Freedman and Keivan Stassun for being awarded a National Medal of Science! 🔭

In honor of all the new arrivals, I'm sharing one of my favorite videos.

It shows 24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock.

Brilliant work by Bartosz Wojczyński. 🧪

artuniverse.eu/gallery/1907...

Data released today by Copernicus Climate shows:

🌡️ It is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record. It is also virtually certain that the annual temperature for 2024 will be more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level, and likely that it will be more than 1.55°C above.

The April Fools Paper Review Process – 2024 There is a tradition in Astronomy to post silly science papers to the arXiv on Aprils Fools day. We’ve collected them all for 2024 and provided some “peer review”

From the Astrobites collaboration: There is a tradition in Astronomy to post silly science papers to the arXiv on Aprils Fools day. We’ve collected them all for 2024 and provided some “peer review". 🔭🧐

astrobites.org/2024/04/01/a...

It's baaaaaack

Dr Denis Sergeev is an exoclimatologist - an expert at taking climate models designed for Earth and applying them to exoplanets. Denis has recently been lead... Meet an Exoplanet Climatologist -- with Dr Denis Sergeev

Super nervous to post this video but extremely grateful to the amazing @smorrell.bsky.social for interviewing me about my research

youtu.be/_Aus842EZWk

A depiction of a pre-merger neutron star and black hole binary created for a LIGO/Virgo/KAGRS+ press release.

A visualisation of GRB 221009A - the brightest gamma ray burst ever observed.

A visualisation of the post-merger aftermath of a compact binary merger. Shown are the red and blue kilonovae components and the emittef short duration gamma ray burst.

Depiction of a gamma ray burst originating from an AGN disk.

Self-plug - If you'd like to have press release images for your papers, keep me in mind for commissioning!

I'm happy to work with you to create a bespoke visualisation of your work.

Here are some of the artworks I've created that have been featured on Washington Post, BBC, NYT and more.

🐡🧪🔭

Well, that’s the training finished for this year’s #LettersToAPreScientist. Looking forward to seeing if I get matched up again.

Huge kudos to the team for providing training and resources for pen-pal safeguarding this year. Really valuable work!

Thanks for your very warm welcome, Michele. It's fantastic to be here. 🙂

Hi Hannah! I hope the mentions haven't been too unflattering. 😅 It's great to virtually meet you here.

Thanks very much for all of the work you're doing as well. I think it's really valuable to be able to apply and translate research into policy, and place it into its real-world context.

Thanks very much for the offer. I will ask around. 🙂

Hello Bluesky! I am am astrophysicist at University of Exeter, currently working on light pollution and stellar characterisation.

The Bad Place is getting super hostile, so thanks to Mike Daniels for the invite code, and @emily.space for acting as broker. The air is so much fresher up here! 😀