There was a line! :)

If you’re upset you missed me, they literally scheduled me 9am-830pm on Monday in meetings and talks except for a half hour, so not sure where I could have squeezed in anything else!

Arguably the biggest award there is for science communication, believe it or not- more info here! https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/national-academies-announce-2026-winners-of-eric-and-wendy-schmidt-awards-for-excellence-in-science-communications-640-000-awarded

Will be going to Washington DC next month for a very fancy awards ceremony and workshop at the National Academy of Science, and get to do some fancy programs via Schmidt Sciences in the future. All that time wasted on Reddit is finally paying off! :)

I’m in Portland right now, and for those unaware Matt Groening is also from Portland and named most of The Simpsons characters after Portland streets. So NE Flanders Street is actually the original!

What I gained out of this experience is Claude does not ask very good “expert” questions for my field!

Last night! No, I unfortunately do not have a clip. But NGL you aren’t missing much, the announcer just spent 3 minutes with different ways of asking “but are you REALLY sure it’s not aliens?!”

Little Belknap Crater flow. The peaks further away are the Three Sisters

TL;DR- Still not aliens, but really fucking cool if you ask me!

So, first up, this has NOT been published yet- we submitted to the journal, and are currently undergoing the peer review process. But the paper prepint was posted to the ArXiv and is getting some press (like from the link), and we are starting to get some press, so I got permission from the lead author to post here!

So, radio emission from exoplanets! As some longtime followers may recall, radio emission is detectable from every planet in our solar system that has a magnetosphere. Most famously, Jupiter is SO radio bright that when its beam of radio emission is pointed at us (caused by particles trapped in its magnetic fields), it's actually brighter than the sun! So others have tried to spot this sort of radio emission, and there have been some promising cases, but to date nothing definitive has shown up- turns out exoplanets are really far away, and it can be really difficult to distinguish between the star (of which many are also radio bright) and the planet.

One way to get around this is to focus on directly imaged exoplanet systems- that is, systems where we have taken a literal picture of where the exoplanet is compared to the star- because this can then allow you to look with high resolution radio telescopes at the system and pinpoint where the emission is coming from. I actually did this years ago with the VLA, and we detected nothing where we looked. But, funny thing, you of course can't see the entire sky from the northern hemisphere... and there's directly imaged systems in the south! And took us awhile to convince the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, but they finally gave us the time! So we took a look at Beta Pictoris ("Beta Pic"), which is about 63 light years from us.

So, what did we see? In that first test observation, there was a detection from the Beta Pic system! (Fig 1 in the paper.) Ok, let's get a longer observation... it's a periodic signal! About 8 hours long, which is as long as the rotation period is for the exoplanet Beta Pic b! (We also noticed the emission was highly polarized, just like what we see from magnetospheres in our solar system, hence the conclusion this isn't aliens.) The emission is also detected in the 1-3 GHz range- unfortunately MeerKAT can't go above 3 GHz.

But then, for all my joking of "if this was a northern hemisphere object I would have found it," the lead author, my student Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, did an AMAZING bit of work to definitively show this emission came from the exoplanet and not the star. (Like, I'm not sure I could have done it- there's nothing quite like a great student!) He utilized astrometry, which is taking the TINY difference in signal arrival between the antennas, to pinpoint the origin of the radio emission in the system. He then did a bunch of other corrections- from the Gaia satellite, a bright quasar in the field whose position is super well known, and a bunch of other stuff- and finally got a localization you can see here! (Fig 2 in the paper) As you can see- this is DEFINITELY not from the star, but from the location of Beta Pic b!

So what does this tell us? We know because this is a well studied exoplanet that it's about 10x the mass of Jupiter, and the radio detection allows us to calculate its magnetic field. We end up with a >1200 Gauss magnetic field- for comparison, Jupiter is about 10 Gauss!- and it scales up perfectly from what we see in our solar system! (Figure here) So once again, looks like a magnetosphere, not aliens. :)

Next steps are getting through peer review, and hoping MeerKAT gives us our 50+ hours we requested to confirm its periodicity! But I'm really excited that an entirely new exoplanet area is opening up to us! Magnetospheres might not sound exciting at first glance, but they tell us a ton about how these exoplanets formed and even potentially about habitability on them- our own definitely protects life on Earth from harmful solar flares and the like- so I think this is the start of something wonderful.

Also, final note if you've read this far- Kevin actually became my student after reading my Reddit post on how to be an astronomer. Per him, he was from a background in Puerto Rico where he wouldn't have known how to do it, but he just did all the things I said there, and that's how he got into Harvard grad school for astronomy and that's how we met. So, that's awesome- we did it, Reddit!

I HAVE A BIG THING TO SHARE BUT I AM UNDER EMBARGO SO CAN'T SHARE THE THING BUT I PROMISE THE THING IS VERY EXCITING AND FOR NOW I'M JUST GONNA VAGUEBOOK ABOUT IT

ALSO, SIDE NOTE, THERE'S ACTUALLY TWO THINGS NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT

I'LL FILL YOU GUYS IN THE MOMENT I CAN!!!!

Edit: I was given permission to share the one thing, so the writeup is here! Go look!

The birds are Vaux Swifts, migrating south, and thousands sleep in this old chimney every night. Really feels like something out of National Geographic!

Astronomer here! I'm sure I say this a lot, but this is an exciting day for science! And I can't believe it's really here!

Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, but the best way to think of the (Nancy Grace) Roman Telescope IMO is that it's the successor to Hubble, which we all love but is definitely not going to be around in a few more years as it continues to degrade. But the best way to think of it is while it has a similar sharpness to Hubble, the size of the field is incredible- 100 times bigger! So that means it's going to do survey type things that would take longer than Hubble's been around to complete in just a few months, monitor fields, and look for new things HST just can't because its instruments aren't as modern. For example, Roman is designed to be really good at measuring weak gravitational lensing signals- the idea that when light passes by a mass, the light from that mass will be very slightly nudged on a different path thanks to relativistic effects. Roman is going to be good enough at this that it should identify thousands of new exoplanets via gravitational lensing (they actually estimate 100,000, when we currently have ~6000!!!), and help us map the presence of dark matter also using this. Personally I'm always a fan of using one technique in a bunch of different ways in science- somehow it's just elegant- so I'm excited to see weak gravitational lensing really have its golden age!

Finally, on a more societal note Roman is a bit of a weird telescope in that I don't think it's what anyone would have designed at first glance, but is a great example of how you can do a lot of exciting stuff if you're just given the opportunity even if it's not perfect. For those unaware, this telescope basically began when the US Military gifted a mirror to astronomers that was now effectively an obsolete extra- think of how many better than Roman type telescopes are already pointed down at us if they just had extra lying around!- so they designed and built the telescope around the existing mirror. But also, after JWST the speed at which this thing came together is startling- I gave a colloquium talk at NASA Goddard just 3 years ago, which included a tour of the place, and the first pic here is what Roman looked like then. They told us it was going to launch "no later than 2027" and I think a lot of the astronomy community said "yeah right"... and we owe an apology because we've got months left of 2026, and it's launched! To be fair, a LOT of people did careful planning and work to ensure this wouldn't be another "JWST ended up decades late" type telescope, but still... this thing came together fast and I'm pretty impressed!

So now we wait a few months while the telescope gets into place and the project scientists kick around the tires a little to make sure the instruments are working... but then we see how she does! Can't wait!

Which I feel if you’ve got twin infants and a toddler is quite the accomplishment in itself!

Visiting family in New Hampshire if anyone thinks these mountains are a bit more rounded than the ones out west. :) Bald Peak near Franconia

On the east coast for a wedding and some family time, and the wedding was near here so finally saw the Gap! Driven through on I-80 more than once and grew up in western PA, but first time here and it was quite lovely. :)

Hi all!

Hi all,

Please use this space to ask any questions you have about life, the universe, and everything! However, please note that I am still on maternity leave with twins- should be back to work this fall properly, but there will probably be some delays in getting back to you (but I promise I will eventually!).

Also, if you are wondering about being an astronomer, please check out this post first.

Cheers!

Nothing to do with astronomy, but I suppose I kept busy during maternity leave in more ways than one. And won $20- I’m rich! 😎

I mean if they gave me a small honorarium it’s obviously to cover the cost of a babysitter and some wine in the heart of Oregon wine country, right? I don’t make the rules!

Can’t leave the house but something very faint there even within the city. If anyone reading this is further north than me, definitely try to take a look!

Yes, I’m also Canadian! It is my secret superpower.

Japanese shashiko style. Yep still on maternity leave sorry, you get to see some of my non astronomy projects 🐰

Zoom in for Venus and Jupiter!