mattkenworthy

mattkenworthy, 24 days ago to random

In my astronomy career I have had my foot run over by Stephen Hawking, had Neil deGrasse Tyson come to my seminar and promptly fall asleep, and stood in an elevator with Roger Penrose where he was wearing exactly the same clothing as the publicity poster on the elevator wall behind his shoulder.

mattkenworthy, 11 months ago to random

This actually happened outside our observatory at lunchtime (the pistachio ice cream was delicious) Credit: The Far Side / Gary Larson

mattkenworthy, 11 months ago to random

Me filling in a grading form 10 years ago: enters text into PDF, save and submit

Me filling in a grading form today: opens PDF into Adobe Acrobat, all bullet points are now on the far left hand side, two areas for signatures are greyed out with radiation symbols. I click on a drop down menu to select the specialization, the lights flicker and turn off, a subsonic whoomph is heard in the distance, car alarms plaintively start bleeping-

mattkenworthy, 1 month ago to scifi

A #scifi question: are there any novels set in protoplanetary disk systems? Everyone seems to go for fully formed planets, but you could play an excellent game of hide and seek in the Hill sphere of a forming gas giant, no?

mattkenworthy, 8 months ago to random

Astronomy students: your occasional reminder to please set up a web page with your current contact details on it - other astronomers may want to invite you for a talk or a collaboration. Don't make it challenging for them to find you! https://kenworthy.space/advice.html#advpage

mattkenworthy, 13 days ago to Astro

One of this morning’s posts on #arxiv had quite a sobering lede: ☀️☠️ #astrodon

mattkenworthy, 1 year ago to random

Can we image tidally heated exomoons using JWST? Probably! This is a new paper by graduate student Elina Kleisioti who is working with me and Dominic Dirkx from TU Delft - she simulated internal models for exomoons around Eps Eri b, a gas giant exoplanet around a very nearby star. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.03410 "Tidally Heated Exomoons around ε Eridani b: Observability and prospects for characterization" /1 🧵

mattkenworthy, 5 months ago to Astronomy

Happy Solstice everyone! The Sun reaches its southernmost point on the Celestial sphere in the next minute, and will begin moving towards the North again. #astronomy #TooEarlyToBeAwakeRightNow

mattkenworthy, 5 months ago to emacs

The best time to learn #emacs and #orgmode is ten years ago. The second best time is today. I use #orgmode as my calendar and organiser, and each year I discover something more awesome in it. I didn't realise how good the exporter is and how well formed the HTML is, so now I'll keep my notes on astronomy literature in a new org file. Future proofing through flat text files FTW.

mattkenworthy, 10 months ago to Skeptic

The neutrino map is an amazing result, but from a #scicomm point of view, there's virtually no reason to show it in equatorial projection where the Galaxy is the U-shaped white line - very unintuitive for non-astronomers!

Since there are many sources along the Galactic plane, why not show it in galactic coordinates instead?

#astrodon

mattkenworthy, 7 months ago to Astro

A boggling exoplanet result by Pearson and @markmccaughrean with JWST data on Orion - 540 planetary mass objects detected down to 0.6 Jupiter masses, of which there are 42 Jupiter Mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs)! Utterly amazing to see the binary fraction pivot like this... cue #arXiv posts from your favorite planet formation theorists in 3,2,1... https://esait-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/mjm_esa_int/EfOqOGdZHQ1IlHVH2dNFG4sBcyIBPjePlDE2Ry7H9A3-BA?e=pBa1IO #astrodon #astronomy #exoplanets

Pairs of white dots on a blue background, representing binary planet mass objects in the Trapezium cluster.

mattkenworthy, 5 months ago to ai

Possibly a foolish question for the Mastodon mind, but with #Dropbox now willing to trawl my data for #AI purposes, is the concept of an invasive-free cloud drive impossible? Or should I stop worrying and learn to love #rsync over #ssh again?

mattkenworthy, 3 months ago to Astro

Made a drawing of an adaptive optics system during a student meeting and inadvertently drew pretty much every astronomical instrument in one figure. #astrodon #SPIE #astroinstrumentation

mattkenworthy, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Aaaah, the satisfaction of seeing the green check mark appear on a build with #ShowYourWork https://show-your.work/en/latest/ means that my paper's scientific workflow is reproducible! h/t @dfm #ReproducibleScience #OpenScience

mattkenworthy, 5 months ago to Astro

The population of free-floating binary #exoplanets 🔭🪐 in the Trapezium is explained by Portegies-Zwart and Hochart in: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04645 by showing that capture or exchange is unlikely; it's in-situ formation of a high binary fraction and subsequent evaporation! So, older star forming regions should have fewer exoplanet binaries, which seems to be the case with discoveries of free floating planets in other surveys. Expect people to be looking with #JWST in the near future... #astrodon

mattkenworthy, 4 months ago to Astro

Collaborator Ernst de Mooij brought a 3D printout of the data we are analyzing in our latest research paper, a fantastic and very tactile gift! Any guesses as to what the data represents, and which star we're looking at? 🔭🪐Hint: it's not pulsar data! #astrodon #3dprinting

3d printout of astronomical data - a long ridge with small mountains mostly on the right hand side, and a few appearing on the left at the back.

mattkenworthy, 1 year ago to random

Periodic reminder to #astrodon - if I cannot google "<your name> astronomer" and get your current email address within the first page of results, then you need a web page NOW: https://kenworthy.space/advice.html#advpage

mattkenworthy, 4 months ago to Astronomy

A lovely way to end out the year, a paper led by Klaus Hodapp on "An Episode of Occultation Events in Gaia21bcv" where I carried out a bit of analysis to show that the light curve is consistent with an approximately 1 au diameter eclipser, possibly a circumsecondary disk around a secondary companion to the primary star. Gaia's photometry will detect more of these systems, adding to known disk eclipsers. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv231216367H/abstract #astronomy #exorings #astrodon

mattkenworthy, 3 months ago to random

Today in "Microsoft is not intuitive at all" I logged into a new email account, clicked and dragged a Word document onto my desktop.... and it saved the icon image instead of copying the document. #UIfail #microsoftevent

mattkenworthy, 27 days ago to random

To sell a telescope: https://kenworthy.micro.blog/2024/05/01/to-sell-a.html

mattkenworthy, 9 months ago to random

The most surprising fact I learned from #Oppenheimer is that if you have a crying toddler you can just GIVE THEM to a fellow academic for several months at a time. Absolute game changer!

mattkenworthy, 1 month ago to random

A new paper by Leiden PhD student Sam de Regt showcases a completely new pipeline written for Polarimetric Differential Imaging for VLT/NACO. He took all archival polarimetric observations of circumstellar material with NACO and ran them through his PIPPIN pipeline to produce a consistent set of newly reduced images of circumstellar disks and dust. His work includes many famous disks which can be compared to more recent SPHERE images to look for any changes in the morphology. /1

mattkenworthy, 14 days ago to Astro

On Friday 12 July in the evening I’ll be giving a talk about “Rocks, Rubble and Rings” a.k.a. colliding exoplanets at #SpaceLates at the National Space Centre in Leicester! There are several talks and workshops, ideal for families, so go and book your tickets 🔭🪐 #astrodon #outreach https://www.spacecentre.co.uk/whats-on/space-lates-july/

mattkenworthy, 2 days ago to Astro

Oh now THIS is very intriguing! Bernhard and Lloyd with ZTF J185259.31+124955.2: A new evolved disc-eclipsing binary system where the shape of the transit is evolving significantly on every eclipse - look at how much it changes… just wow. 🔭🪐 #astrodon https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15555