This week we are hosting the @terrahunting.bsky.social science team in Oxford. Terra Hunting will use HARPS3 which is right now being installed on the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma to search for nearby Earth analogues. Exciting times! @oxfordphysics.bsky.social @oxoplanets.bsky.social
Box full of space books
Book: questions and answers, stars and planets
My dad is moving which means going through all my books stored at his- my Astro book collections is slightly insane it turns out. But more importantly, I found the book that started the space obsession for me! 🔭⭐️🪐
Big congrats to Jennifer Burt, Xavier Dumusque, and Sam Halverson on finishing their epic (instant classic) Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics article "Precise Radial Velocities"!
arxiv.org/abs/2511.01954
contains some great new graphics for talks on
#exoplanets #EPRV #DopplerSpectroscopy
Me pointing at HARPS3 below
HARPS3 has definitely arrived at the INT (and I was only slightly excited to see it!) @terrahunting.bsky.social
The TNG as the sun sets
Clouds rolling in over mountains
The MAGIC telescope at night
The William Hershel Telescope
I’ve made it to La Palma where I’ll be spending the next week observing with the TNG! Here are some mandatory photos of the observatory 🔭🌟💫
It’s happening!! Can’t believe I arrived in La Palma the same day!
Great talk by @niamhk12.bsky.social on her talk at the Oxford Astrophysics Early Career Showcase! Teaching us all about supergranulation and the need to understand it in order to detect Earth twins!
The official number of exoplanets has surpassed 6,000! And you can access data on all 6,007 of them right here at IPAC 📈 🪐
Watch the video & read all about the center of the exoplanet universe (also known as NExScI!) here:
www.ipac.caltech.edu/news/the-nas...
So excited for this!!!
Very excited to share that my new paper has been accepted for publication in MNRAS!
We are applying Doppler Imaging to model the activity signals from the HARPS-N Sun-as-a-star spectra! We show that injected planets can be retrieved with great accuracy!
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025MNRA... 🔭🪐🧪
Sailing boat in front of a red moon
Sometimes the world is just beautiful
Congrats to DPhil student Niamh on her incredible talk! Her work on supergranulation is helping to improve our ability to detect Earth like planets around sunlike stars! You can read more of her work here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.23693
Had a great time at #eprv6 this week! We had a splinter session on supergranulation that led to some great discussions! Thank you to everyone who came!
Figure 1
Figure 2
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Figure 4
Measuring the Suns radial velocity variability due to supergranulation over a magnetic cycle. Niamh K. O'Sullivan et. al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23693
So how long does it take to detect and characterise the supergranulation signal? Using the Fisher information content we show that in 23 nights we can characterise the supergranulation timescale in 10 stars, if we switch randomly between stars every 5 minutes!
Standard deviation and timescale of supergranulation as a function of year. Compared to the Sun Spot number in the lower panel.
We find that the supergranulation timescale is anti-correlated with the Sun’s activity cycle. When the Sun is at solar minimum, the supergranules have a larger timescale! This means that we can’t treat supergranulation as static over the timescales of long baseline RV surveys!
We look at the HARPS-N quiet Sun RVs, derived using both SDO data and YARARA. We model the range quiet Sun RVs with a GP kernel with 2 aperiodic SHO terms and a white noise term.
It’s paper day 🎉!! If you are interested in seeing how supergranulation changes over a solar cycle in RVs give it a read! arxiv.org/abs/2506.23693
EPRV6 title slide
Excited to be at #eprv6 this week! If you are here and want to talk about supergranulation come find me!
Niamh O’Sullivan presenting a slide on how much we need to observe stars to detect supergranulation.
Had a great time learning all about PLATO and the PLATO-ESP conference in Marseille this week!
A sprawling, textured field of galaxies scattered across the deep black of space. It is filled with the delicate smudges and glowing cores of galaxies of many shapes, sizes and colors, as well as the bright multi-colored points of stars. The image focuses on a collection of interacting galaxies connected by delicate streams of stars. At top center lies a large elliptical galaxy that is dense and smooth, like a polished stone glowing with golden light. Like delicate spider silk or stretched taffy, these stellar bridges link the large elliptical to the few larger galaxies beneath, evidence of past collisions. All throughout the image, thousands of galaxies gather in clusters or are spread throughout, like glittering gems strewn on a table. Some are sharp-edged and spiral, like coiled ribbons; others round and diffuse, like polished pebbles. Still others are just smudges of various colors against the black of space. The background is peppered with pinpoint stars in reds, yellows, and blues, crisp against the velvet black.
A cosmic tapestry of glowing tan and pink gas clouds with dark dust lanes. In the upper right, the Trifid Nebula resembles a small flower in space. Its soft, pinkish gas petals are surrounded by blue gas, and streaked with dark, finger-like veins of dust that divide it into three parts. It radiates a gentle, misty glow, diffuse and soft like the warmth of breath on a cold hand. To the lower left, the much larger Lagoon Nebula stretches wide like a churning sea of magenta gas, with bright blue, knotted clumps sprinkled throughout where new stars are born. Both nebulae are embedded in a soft tan backdrop of gas that is brighter on the left than on the right, etched with dark tendrils of dust and sprinkled with the pinpricks of millions of stars.
A sprawling, textured field of galaxies scattered across the deep black of space. It is filled with the delicate smudges and glowing cores of galaxies of many shapes, sizes and colors, as well as the bright multi-colored points of stars. To the lower left is a region filled with the hundreds of golden glittering gems of a distant galaxy cluster. In the foreground, below and right of center, two blue spiral galaxies look like eyes beneath the entangled mass of a triple galaxy merger in the upper right. A few bright blue points of foreground stars pierce the glittering tapestry. All throughout the image, thousands of galaxies gather in clusters or are spread throughout, like glittering gems strewn on a table. Some are sharp-edged and spiral, like coiled ribbons; others round and diffuse, like polished pebbles. Still others are just smudges of various colors against the black of space. The background is peppered with pinpoint stars in reds, yellows, and blues, crisp against the velvet black.
Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory!
Can you guess these regions of sky?
This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪
#RubinFirstLook
ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream
Don't sleep on Gaussian processes. Most under-rated model class on this or any other planet (we've used Gaussian processes to study exo-planets!)
Spent the evening at @wolfsonoxford.bsky.social learning about astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia! It was fascinating!
Halley’s Comet and recordings of the comet from 164 BCE
Calculations of distance travelled by Jupiter from ancient clay tablets
We had a great talk by @moudhy.bsky.social at @wolfsonoxford.bsky.social AstroClub this evening! Thank you so much to everyone who came along and especially to Moudhy for such a great talk!
... and the picture of the grism in its holder just before installation - how beautiful is this?!
Come join us if you are interested in astronomy, history, or both! Should be a great event!
Happy May Morning from Oxford 🌸 🌺🌻
Roger Penrose giving a talk
93 years old and an incredible speaker
Oxford town hall, with slide on the criteria for a good solvent life
Quite the venue for #Discuss2025!
Reading more about this, I'm disappointed in the authors of this study & how they've turned a very marginal result into worldwide press releases.
In this climate, we as scientists have a responsibility to lead by example and represent our work accurately to the press. This is not that. ☄️🔭🧪
