Eric Agol

Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie It started in a laboratory. No one could have predicted where it would end.

In Opinion

“We definitely have an attention problem, but it’s not just a function of the digital technology that pings and beeps and flashes and nudges us ever closer to despair,” write D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt. “It starts with the way we think about attention.”

Nice discovery of a Saturn-mass microlens using the different perspectives of Earth and the GAIA telescope @gaiamission.bsky.social, and a nice animation to boot! arxiv.org/src/2601.000... www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

NASA Discovers Distant Planet With Conditions That Could Sustain Rocks

NASA Discovers Distant Planet With Conditions That Could Sustain Rocks https://theonion.com/nasa-discovers-distant-planet-with-conditions-that-could-sustain-rocks/

A bright, central, curved shape similar to a yin yang symbol sits in the centre of the image, surrounded by fainter, larger, but similarly shaped structures. The background is wispy, against a starfield (with one prominently bright star at lower left).

These are shells of dust coming off a pair of tightly bound stars, newly imaged by #JWST.

There is such beauty in the universe.

Our special November issue, celebrating 30 years of exoplanets, is now here! https://bit.ly/483MH9I
#astronomy #exoplanets

Lost Sisters Found: TESS and Gaia Reveal a Dissolving Pleiades Complex Most star clusters dissolve into the Galaxy over tens to hundreds of millions of years after they form. While recent Gaia studies have honed our view of cluster dispersal, the exact chronology of whic...

New paper from my group!
Stars aren’t born alone—they form in massive associations. If we want to understand how stars and planetary systems form, we need to figure out where today’s clusters came from… and where all their long-lost siblings ended up.
arxiv.org/abs/2511.07533

My talk is tomorrow! FEAR: the impact of killer whales on baleen whales.

Streaming: hmsc.oregonstate.edu/main/science...

Ice Giants Pre-Decadal Survey Mission Study Report The Ice Giants Study was commissioned by NASA to take a fresh look (as of 2017) at science priorities and concepts for missions to the Uranus and Neptune systems in preparation for the third Planetary...

My most important service to solar system planetary science was being a part of the Science Definition Team (SDT), nearly a decade ago, that made the science case for an NASA Ice Giants Orbiter and Entry Probe. Check out our 2017 document: arxiv.org/abs/2511.13946

🧪🔭⭐ #exoplanets #exoplanet #youngplanets
New paper from our group and @madysonbarber.bsky.social today!
We report a brand-new planet around a <50 Myr star—adding to a very small (but rapidly growing!) population of the youngest known transiting planets.
Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10734

YouTube video by Chris Rackauckas Automatic differentiation is incorrect on very simple functions??? 😱 😱 😱

#SciML fact of the day: automatic differentiation fails to give the correct derivative on a lot of very simple functions 😱 😱 😱 . #julialang #automaticdifferentiation

youtube.com/shorts/KTguZ...

RIP George Smoot. My first project in astrophysics was with George's group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. That summer I showed that the COBE temperature fluctuations were consistent with a Normal distribution, which I did not realize at the time was a confirmation of a prediction of inflation.

Kareem El-Badry Named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow Kareem El-Badry Named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow

Congratulations to @kelbadry.bsky.social for becoming a McArthur genius!!! 🤩🥳

www.caltech.edu/about/news/k...

🔭🧪🎢

Yes, during my sabbatical there in 2017.

Yall check this out, it’s the top coolest thing I’ve seen in a while, closed form autodiffable representation of optical interferometry, enormously powerful. Yes!!

So exhausting..

The statue of Pasteur in Paris faces the Invalides where Napoleon is buried. This is apt as one fought germs, while the other fought Germans.

Excellent review paper on prospects for high-precision photometry of exoplanet systems with JWST by Sarah Millholland & Joshua Winn: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Not only did this paper get published, but the author, Thomas Count Dracula, received the “Best Author of the Month” award. www.easpublisher.com/article/arti... h/t @bluewhalenews.bsky.social

Astronomy 🔭 and physics ⚛️ GRFP applications are due Nov 14! Only seniors and 1st-year grad students can apply now (no second years).

Today Sept 27, 2025. It marks a special mathematical date because the numerals of the date form perfect squares.
Written as 09/27/2025, it becomes 9,272,025, which is the square of 3,045.
When written in the European format 27/09/2025, it becomes 27,092,025, the square of 5,205.

Can an expert tell me if these error bars are accurate? arxiv.org/abs/2509.17454

Congrats to Univ of Washington's Prof. Josh Krissansen-Totton (former UCSC postdoc!) on being selected for the AGU Ronald Greeley Early Career Award in Planetary Sciences
www.agu.org/user-profile...

A High-Precision, Differentiable Code for Solar System Ephemerides We present jorbit, a python/JAX library designed to enable modern data-driven numerical studies of the solar system. Written entirely in JAX, an auto-differentiable and optionally GPU accelerated lang...

A High-Precision, Differentiable Code for Solar System Ephemerides (Cassese et al in press) arxiv.org/abs/2509.19549

Did you try l’Industrie pizzeria? I didn’t get to eat there since the line was too long, but apparently it is worth the wait!

On the 🔭🧪 postdoc job market? Excited about science with Rubin and big surveys? Come join us at DiRAC. I’m so excited that we’re able to offer a few of these Fellowship positions this year!

Please share, LMK if you have Q’s!

aas.org/jobregister/...

On 9/16/25, celebrate a date of mathematical beauty Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

YouTube video by AAS AAS Journal Author Series: Richard Zeebe and David Hernandez on 2025AJ....170...71Z

youtu.be/Jx5SxWqpjjI
🔭
AAS Journal Author Series: Richard Zeebe and David Hernandez on 2025AJ....170...71Z

Richard Zeebe (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and David Hernandez (Yale University) chat about their article on stellar flybys of the solar system and their (lack of) effect on the Earth.

Sorry Google and @wikipedia.org but this is not correct. Half of the Nobel prize was awarded to Penrose for the mathematical theory of black holes; the other half to Genzel & Ghez for their study of Sgr A*. (Thanks
@nytgames.bsky.social
Connections for alerting me to this!)

My very first observational project involved an Arp galaxy!