Baptiste Journaux

What a year! Very grateful for the recognition of all the hard work accomplished by our team at UW and abroad over the last few years by the IAPWS. More exciting things to come very soon!

Imaging Ganyemede’s Interior using Tides? 🛰️

Here, we propose measuring Ganymede’s response to tidal intercations with Jupiter using JUICE gravity data. In doing so, we can (maybe) tease out shell thickness variations, which would indicate a convecting ocean.

Read more at:

doi.org/10.1029/2025...

The Moon's nearside mantle is a giant volcano? 🌋

In this study, we infer a 100-200 C temperature anomaly in the Moon's nearside mantle. This anomaly suggests that geologic activity which formed the mare 3-4 billion years ago is still active today.

nature.com/articles/s41...

Planet Definitions xkcd.com/3063

@uwess.bsky.social's @bjour.bsky.social is uncovering how the "cenotectic" could reshape our search for life on icy moons.

Journaux and @tamu.bsky.social's Matt Powell-Palm dive into extreme environments, and what they reveal about more than just planetary science.

ess.uw.edu/2025/03/unlo...

🚀 As NASA’s Europa Clipper embarks on its 5.5-year journey to Europa, a new study in Nature Communications led by UW planetary scientist @bjour.bsky.social reveals groundbreaking research that could revolutionize the search for habitability in our solar system and beyond.

Read the full story👇

Hiring freezes, fewer grad students: Funding uncertainty hits colleges Universities are tightening their belts and reducing graduate student enrollments to steel themselves for potential Trump administration funding cuts.

Undergrads I mentor are seeking PhD programs. Grad students I work with are looking for postdoc positions. Postdocs like me are hoping to become faculty.

Without federal support, many of these dreams will evaporate. It's alarming and depressing to watch so many doors close around us.

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org

For anyone disappointed by 2024 YR4's disappearing threat please remember that even at its peak of ~3% chance it still had a negative rating on the Palermo scale. 1/

Anyway,

"GenAI can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving"

bsky.app/profile/keta...

To understand why the probability of impact was increasing in recent days and is likely to drop to 0 in the next few days/weeks it is important to realize that it was mostly driven by the size of the 1sigma uncertainty which diminished with better observations while earth was still inside it.

Mieux que ça, on a pour la première fois une estimation avec la terre significativement hors du 1sigma d’incertitude du close approach :

bsky.app/profile/mapp...

New results from several of my colleagues in the Planetary Interiors and Geophysics group at JPL (which we lovingly refer to as PIGS).

YouTube video by hankschannel You're Wrong About Pluto

This video by @hankgreen.bsky.social covers why the Galilean moons are so amazing. I love Pluto too, but #Io, #Europa, #Ganymede and #Callisto are top tier Solar System objects. 🧪🔭 #Astronomy #Science #Geology #PlanetaryScience #Space Shoutout to the Europa Clipper: science.nasa.gov/mission/euro...

I think it’s a good idea. If we want to make it successful we need to be inclusive and supportive of students and early career joining and getting some kind of benefits from it. This is something that we have worked on at the Cryobiology society with success. Let’s talk, I’ll be at LPSC too.

Something important to understand about how science is funded in the US

YouTube video by UW College of the Environment UW College of the Environment Grad Student Experience at AGU24

What's it like presenting your research to 25,000 scientists?

ESS PhD student Haskelle White-Gianella shares an insider's view on her first AGU conference, what it's like giving a talk to the AGU scientific community, and making connections for her career and future as a planetary scientist! 🪐🌎

Human Altitude xkcd.com/3039

Inkcap is not a bad one, but I wish I was on the Hydnellum peckii server… 🍄‍🟫🦷

Elena & Topher now have a gofundme: gofund.me/153d27e6. Please help if you can!

Elena and Topher are amazing people and old friends from Seattle before they moved to California. If you can help, consider donating, they lost their house yesterday. What an horrible tragedy for so many folks.

#2683
==--
Liquid's last refuge
One universal melting
Anchors life's promise
==--

See you in the woodlands in March!

Amazing effort, let me know if assistance from the ESS department or faculty would be helpful.

Cenotectic concept redefines search for life on icy worlds As NASA's Europa Clipper embarks on its historic journey to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, Dr. Matt Powell-Palm, a faculty member at Texas A&M University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, has unveiled research that could transform our understanding of icy ocean worlds across the solar system.

The cenotectic concept offers a new framework for assessing liquid stability on icy moons, aiding the search for life in extreme environments like Jupiter's Europa. doi.org/g8wf9t

Cenotectic concept redefines search for life on icy worlds As NASA's Europa Clipper embarks on its historic journey to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, Dr. Matt Powell-Palm, a faculty member at Texas A&M University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, has u...

phys.org/news/2024-12...

If you care about how deep oceans in exoplanets are, sure is!
More to come on that front from our group in the months to come!

Thanks for reading, feel free to contact us for further details!

These results are fascinating both for fundamental thermodynamics as we are defining a novel invariant point, but also in Planetary science as they provide an absolute thermodynamic limit of ocean stability and potential habitability of water-rich worlds.

We also discuss the novel concept of the "cenotectic ocean", or end-game ocean in water-rich planetary bodies which would be controlled by the concentration and temperature of the cenotectic.