BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide.
This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.
This image shows a spiral galaxy that is dominated by a bright central region. The galaxy has blue-purple hues with orange-red regions filled with stars. Also visible are large diffraction spikes, which appears as an 8-pointed star pattern (6 big and two smaller points) over the central region of the galaxy. In the bottom left corner of the image is a second galaxy, cut off by the frame. In the portion you can see, a haze of yellow stars is crossed by darker dust lanes. Lots of stars and galaxies fill the background scene.
JWST image of Arp 298, also known as NGC 7469 and IC 5283.
This image is dominated by NGC 7469, a face-on spiral galaxy. Its companion galaxy IC 5283 is partly visible in the lower left corner.
Credit: ESA, NASA, CSA, L. Armus, A. S. Evans
Source
Screenshot of an X.com post by The Associated Press (@AP) stating that dozens of immigrant families protested for better treatment behind fences at a Texas detention facility, where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent after being detained in Minnesota. Below is a video thumbnail showing a crowd gathered outdoors along a fenced walkway; many people wear bright blue or red outerwear, and some hold signs.
After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.
Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average.
climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...
Rep. Grijalva says she was pepper-sprayed by ICE
The image is divided into four sections, each showing one of the gas giants against a black background. Top left: Jupiter. It appears as a large, round sphere with horizontal bands in shades of brown, tan, and white. A bright white oval storm sits on the lower right side. A faint ring is visible alongside Europa, one of its satellites, which appears very bright with a star-shaped artifact. Top right: Saturn. It has a pale beige surface with soft horizontal shading. Surrounding it is a wide, bright ring system tilted diagonally. The rings look thin and sharply defined, with multiple subtle bands of light and dark. Bottom left: Uranus. It appears as a smooth blue-green sphere with some whitish circular clouds around the pole that is facing the observer. Surrounding it is a bright circular ring system made up of thin white lines. The rings form a bright, symmetrical halo around the planet. Bottom right: Neptune. It is a blue sphere with slightly brighter and darker circular features on its atmosphere. It also has a thin ring system, dimmer and less defined than Uranusβs in this image, appearing as a faint double oval around the planet. Each planet has its name printed below it in white capital letters.
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Time to update the Gas Giant Portrait I created, now including the new versions of Saturn and Uranus I recently processed.
Full size & more info: flic.kr/p/2oUkYSY ππ§ͺ
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/AndreaLuck
Jupiter is next on the list to be updated :)
3x3 multipanel figure showing the AMI imaging results. Top to bottom: raw data, calibrator, and restored images, for the active galaxy NGC 1068, Jupiter's moon Io, and the colliding-wind binary WR 137.
The raw data look like messy interferograms that are hard to understand by eye - and we enhance these data to restore beautiful images of the environment of the black hole in NGC 1068, Jupiter's moon Io, and a dusty binary system WR 137.
Are you someone who is interested in astronomy graduate school? This is a list of many/most departments and their expectations for admissions this year. Please feel free to spread it far and wide. If you are doing admissions and you'd like to update your entry, reach out as per the form!
Growing planets need to eat, and astronomers just found one snacking on gas in between the rings of a protoplanetary disk. aasnova.org/2025/10/08/g... ππ§ͺ
Sad to see the University of Washington Astronomy Department has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. astro.washington.edu/graduate-adm...
My district has been without representation in the House since March.
βThe Destruction of NASAβs Missionβ Whistleblowers reveal OMBβs Unconstitutional Plot to Gut the Agency
New from Committee on Commerce, Science, Transportation Ranking Member Maria Cantwell.
NOTE: This is indeed what I have seen going on inside NASA.
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www.commerce.senate.gov/services/fil...
She basically invented astrophysics.
She proved the laws of chemistry, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics, not just gravity, applied universally.
She determined the composition of the sun and primacy of hydrogen in the universe.
She advised the PhDs of Frank Drake and Frank Kameny.
My first NASA position, as a contractor in the Kepler Science Office, was on a H-1b visa. NASA ended up giving me a medal and now Iβm the Chief Scientist of NASA Exoplanet Science Institute and an American citizen to boot. Seems like a net win for the US, no? But now this:
Using Steward Observatory's MagAO-X, astronomers have capturedβfor the first timeβa baby planet growing inside a disk of dust and gas. The sharp U of A-developed adaptive optics revealed how young worlds plow dark paths through their starβs protoplanetary disks as they form: bit.ly/3Vn0CSo
Yes, JWST should be able to observe this in the IR similarly to LBTI and VLT/SPHERE, but at a bit lower spatial resolution. It would be more sensitive than these observations at wide separations (especially beyond the separation of planet b), but may have poorer performance at close separations
Thanks!
The press release from @stewardobservatory.bsky.social is online now: news.arizona.edu/news/growing... #exoplanets βοΈπ§ͺπ
We don't detect a significant HΞ± accretion signal from CC1, but see it clearly at L' and also in weaker detections at Ks and z'. It appears to be too red for scattered starlight, so we propose it may be a 2nd protoplanet, more embedded in dust. Read our paper here: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Annotated false-color image of the WISPIT 2 system as seen in infrared light by the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI). The host star has been subtracted from the center of the image, with the inner lambda/D radius masked. Two bright circumstellar point sources are seen: CC1 - a superjovian protoplanet candidate(?) in the inner disk cavity, and b - a superjovian protoplanet in a disk gap further out. Three protoplanetary disk rings are also visible despite self subtraction from the KLIP-ADI algorithm (Rings 1, 2, and 3 in the companion paper by R. van Capelleveen et al.)
New protoplanet(s?) alert! I'm happy to share this LBTI image of WISPIT 2 from our team's paper led by Laird Close. Planet b was discovered at HΞ± with MagAO-X following the SPHERE disk discovery (R. van Capelleveen +), and CC1 might be a candidate 2nd (enshrouded?) protoplanet #exoplanets βοΈππ§ͺ
Enjoyed talking w Bruce Dorminey in Iceland about our universal framework to assess which exoplanets & moons may be habitable. Key for search for life beyond Earth! His story: @forbes.com
www.forbes.com/sites/bruced...
@stewardobservatory.bsky.social @uarizonalpl.bsky.social @uarizona.bsky.social
The Smithsonian is an independent institution. It is not a branch, department or division of the federal government. There's no reason why the executive should have any control over anything the Smithsonian does.
Screenshot of the NASA Exoplanet Archive homepage for the alpha Cen system.
WELCOME TO THE FAMILY, ALPHA CEN A b!!!
First hinted at in Wagner+21, now Chas Beichman, Aniket Sanghi and team have published new JWST images of alpha Cen A showing another hint of this Saturn-sized planet candidate!
exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/overview/alp...
mRNA tech is some of the coolest, most powerful, most promising scifi shit humans are currently doing. They are being investigated to help with cancers, autoimmune diseases, M.S., stroke recovery, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and high cholesterol.
π§ͺ BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.
Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.
See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.
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Every living NASA science chief unites in opposition to unprecedented budget cuts www.planetary.org/press-releas...
Like many NASA projects and missions, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute was asked to submit a closeout budget this week. Hopefully just a drill! But very difficult just the same. π
Regardless of what happens, Iβm *so proud* of the service we have performed for the community over the years. β¨πͺπΎππ©π»βπ¬
This is very cool! I have used PCA to subtract stellar PSFs for high-contrast (circumstellar) imaging in a similar fashion, but I had never considered a solar-system application like this.
Excerpt from a textbook showing a derived expression for the approximage luminosity evolution of the Sun from the ZAMS to the present.
There's this analytical result from the 2nd Ed. Of Stellar Interiors by Hansen, Kawaler, and Trimble, Ch. 9 (plus an aside on the implications for life on Earth!)
NASA Goddard is pushing through a 48% staff reduction!!! This could impact the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and many other future Astro missions. News coverage seems not sensational enough. Are we really going to let NASA (as we know it) die quietly? www.space.com/space-explor...
