Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Matthew Kenworthy

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 1d

They're going to put an enormous lawsuit magnet in the sky.
mastodon.social/@sundogplane...

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disas...

mastodon.social

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 1d

A lovely morning to go rowing in #Leiden - my sculling needs improvement, but it’s fantastic to be on the water on these calm Autumn days.

Two single rowing boats with orange striping sit in the water next to a wooden decking. The sky is blue and dotted with clouds, the three quarters Moon is shining in the sky to the top right. The river is flat and still, and a reflection of a windmill can be seen in the water.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 1d

Wow, I am sorry Gerard - definitely their loss. Onwards and upwards!

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Reposted by Matthew Kenworthy

Michael Brown @mjibrown.bsky.social · 1d

A US tech startup is proposing to use mirrors in space to power solar farms on Earth at night. Is this even feasible? And what are the light pollution dangers?

Myself and @mattkenworthy.bsky.social have crunched the numbers for The Conversation.

theconversation.com/a-us-startup...

A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to?

Satellites beaming sunlight down to Earth sound like science fiction – and they have astronomers very worried.

theconversation.com

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Reposted by Matthew Kenworthy

Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 4d

Startup Reflect Orbital aims to power solar farms at night by reflecting sunlight from about 4,000 satellites, has recently requested a license for a 2026 demo. But astronomers warn the bright objects could be “ruinous” to vital scientific research.

Plan to Reflect Sunlight to Power Solar Panels at Night Upsets Astronomers

Reflect Orbital aims to launch its first of a planned 4,000 satellites into orbit next year. Scientists worry that it would be “ruinous” for research.

bloom.bg

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 2d

That is utterly spectacular - holograms are one of the things that got me into science.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 2d

Santos-Sanz+ with “JWST occultation reveals unforeseen complexity in Chariklo’s ring system” - I’m fascinated by #exorings and seeing more activity and weirdness with small bodies in the Solar system gets me very intrigued indeed….. #astrosci #astrodon

$A plot showing the light curve of a star passing behind Chariklo's rings. A horizontal line, with two narrow dips. Zoomed in panels showing the eclipses in detail show positive excursions from diffraction around the edge of the rings.$

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 3d

"Hold my beer, now watch this!"

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 3d

Getting mentally prepared to read all the #slack channels on #wispit2 #JWST proposals

A middle aged man wearing a metal helmet and what looks like welders glass in ski giggles. It is a photo from the 1950's showing army equipment.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 5d

"Aaaah, go on Ted!"

Richard Alexander @richardalexander.bsky.social · 5d

Happy Father Dougal Day to those who celebrate. 🎉

(Admittedly that's basically just my third-year class, but we'll still have some fun with it.)

Richard Alexander @richardalexander.bsky.social · Oct 11

First time on this platform: it's "angular-diameter distances with Father Dougal" day. Looking at my notes, we're also doing luminosity distances with the muppets ("near", "far"...). 🔭

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 8d

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 8d

I'm torn about this. Paying once for infinite updates is (imho) unreasonable but we've been conditioned to have everything free on the internet... how to set a (reasonable) refresh payment is tricky.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 11d

Wolff, @andrasgaspar.bsky.social et al. with a beautiful analysis of “JWST/MIRI Imaging of the Warm Dust Component of the Epsilon Eridani Debris Disk”, the last of the “Big Four” circumstellar disks with #JWST - a smooth disk at all but the longer wavelengths and hosting an RV #exoplanet ☄️

Four images showing a smooth round disk face on to our line of sight. The longest wavelength image a thin ring can be seen superimposed in the image.

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Reposted by Matthew Kenworthy

Richard Alexander @richardalexander.bsky.social · 11d

New paper, led by @physicsuol.bsky.social PhD student @simintong.bsky.social. Simin looked at the rings we see in planet-forming discs, and combined new models with multi-wavelength ALMA observations to understand the underlying physical properties of the dust and gas. 🔭

arxiv.org/abs/2509.24818

Fig.3 from Tong et al. (2025), showing ALMA observations of the GM Aur protoplanetary disc at 1.3mm (Band 6) and 2.1mm (Band 4). Left panels are the sky-plane images from Huang et al. (2020); right panels show the same observations de-projected.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 11d

Cugno and Grant @sierragrant.bsky.social with “A Carbon-rich Disk Surrounding a Planetary-mass Companion” detected using #JWST - an impressive detection of several different carbon molecules that are very promising for #exomoon formation around the directly imaged #exoplanet CT Cha b ☄

An image of the planetary companion CT Cha b shown as a red dot next to its parent star, with a spectrum from 12 to 16 microns from JWST showing several rotational and vibrational bands in emission for several carbon molecules.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 11d

Congratulations to you and the team, this is a very cool result!

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Reposted by Matthew Kenworthy

Marco Langbroek @marcolangbroek.bsky.social · 18d

Herfstequinox

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 25d

A very cool result! Julo+ with a paper on “Stellar halo subtraction … with integral field spectroscopy… on the PDS70, HTLup, and YSES1 systems” showing that the YSES 1b #exoplanet has a lot of emission lines - H alpha , H beta, He I, Ca H and K triplets, Na in absorption… oh my! #astrodon ☄

Two spectra of the planet YSES 1b. The left hand spectrum shows a huge peak of Hydrogen alpha emission, and the right hand spectrum shows Calcium II triplet in emission, next to a fuzzy Sodium absorption feature.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 29d

Thanks! The scary bit is that if we didn't have GRAVITY astrometry, we would have kept calling it a planet for a few more years.... its velocity really is consistent with a bound Keplerian orbit around the star...

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 29d

Some sad #exoplanets news in a paper led by me: “YSES 2b is a background star”. A distant M dwarf star some 2 kiloparsecs behind the star just so happens to have a non-zero proper motion in EXACTLY the wrong direction: this required multiple GRAVITY observations to solve… #astrosci #astrodon

A coiled spiral representing proper motion plus parallax shows a fit to several astrometric points, showing that the object next to the star YSES 2 is probably a very distant M dwarf star far away in our Galaxy. Drat, damn and blast!

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 29d

My periodic reminder for #astrosci #astrodon #exoplanets Early Career Researchers to please, please, please have a simple web site with your current email address on it - rationale here: kenworthy.space/advice/

A pen sketch of a web page for an astronomer, showing name, email, optional phone number, and professional contact details, with a one sentence summary of their research and an ADS link.

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · 29d

These maps are utterly amazing, the author wrote up detailed descriptions and design choices in the GitHub repos - really detailed and brilliant work! #astrosci

Luke Steuber @lukesteuber.com · 29d

This is also amazing and she open sourced the method

The Geology of the Moon

A map of basins, lava flows, valleys, and impact craters on the Earth's Moon.

tabletopwhale.com

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · Sep 10

Right, now I wonder where WISPIT 2 is in this box....?

Emily Hunt @emily.space · Sep 10

What happens when a star cluster disperses? Well, it forms a stream of stars - and those streams are all around us!

In a new paper by Sebastian Ratzenböck at the CfA / @univie.ac.at, we looked into streams near to the Sun, and found that the Milky Way's disk is *full* of streams! 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

Figure from the paper showing detected streams in the Milky Way in Cartesian coordinates, where streams are shown as highlighted volumes. The Sun is at X=Y=Z 0 pc (the red cross): so these streams are all around us!

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · Sep 9

The horse is lovely but I had an actual pang of longing to be back in Tucson seeing those mountains... 🏔️🏔️🏔️

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Matthew Kenworthy @mattkenworthy.bsky.social · Sep 9

Two papers announcing the discovery of a directly imaged 6 Jupiter mass planet around binary system HD 143811 AB Squicciarini+ and Jones+ in Sco-Cen - Keck, Gemini and VLT all imaging this companion and confirmed with several years of common proper motion. #astrodon #exoplanet #exosci

Figure from Squicciarini et al. showing three panels with a white dot on a black and blue stippled background, indicating the location of the planet in GPI and SPHERE IRDIS data.&10;

Three panel image from Jones et al. showing a white dot on a stippled background. The planet is in the 11 o'clock position in all three images.

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