Daniel Thorngren
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dpthorngren.bsky.social
Daniel Thorngren
@dpthorngren.bsky.social
740 followers 340 following 400 posts
Davis Fellow at Johns Hopkins studying exoplanet interiors with computer modelling and statistics. I'm also on Mastodon: @[email protected]
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dpthorngren.bsky.social
Sanghi et al. have found an #exoplanet candidate around Alpha Centauri A! If it turns out to be real, it is likely a gas giant planet on a couple of years orbit. Fingers crossed! They've got a second paper looking at follow-up strategy.

ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXi...
An image of the vicinity of Alpha Centauri A on the sky. A yellow star symbol is drawn in the center to mark where the star is, but the area around it has been blacked out by the telescope to prevent glare from the star preventing us from seeing planets. The picture is colored from black to red to white, corresponding with how bright that part of the sky is. The image has some lumpy noise, but a noticeably bright spot is circled and labeled S1. This is the candidate planet. The x and y axes are right ascension and declination respectively, in arc-seconds; basically a zoomed-in picture of that part of the sky. The title is "PSF Subtracted Image", which means they have processed out the fringing patterns you get from a telescope that is very zoomed in.
August 8, 2025 at 5:26 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
A screenshot from Star Wars: A New Hope, in which Han is focusing and C-3PO is leaning over him, saying "It's quite possible this system is not entirely stable...". Technically he said that line (but with asteroid instead of system) in a different scene, but ehhhhh whatever.
August 8, 2025 at 1:29 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Look they gave us this meme specifically for these moments:
A screaming cyborg monkey from Superman, part of Luthor's troll farm. Yes, it's staffed by cyber-monkeys, typing vitriol onto the internet. Yes, that's pretty on-the-nose.
July 25, 2025 at 6:32 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Just found out about this fabulous diagram of the local stars from Reylé (2021). Stars with known planets are highlighted in green, and the brackets indicate how far above or below the galactic plane it is (in parsecs).

You can look at a few versions of the map here: gruze.org/10pc/resourc...
A map of the local stars near us, stretching out to 10 parsecs, viewed from above the galactic plane looking down. Around 500 stars are shown, mostly m-dwarfs, and many in binary systems. A bluish blob forms the background, representing local clouds of interstellar hydrogen. Two red circles stand out, representing the Stromgren Spheres of Sirius and 40 Eridani, which are regions where the stars have ionized the surrounding hydrogen. Stars with known planets are highlighted in green; not many stars are highlighted, which is more related to our ability to detect planets than whether they are actually there (it's much easier if they transit, but that's uncommon).
July 23, 2025 at 4:57 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Or this clearly superior option
A Pikachu plush that is also a bag. Pikachu looks derpy and strangely wide, but it's still kinda endearing.
July 11, 2025 at 3:00 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
The observations are entirely consistent with no distinct water layer at all (see image), and any such layer is more likely to be in a supercritical fluid state than liquid (center rather than left). It's even possible that there is no separate water layer at all (miscible envelope case, right)!
A diagram of possible interior structures of mini-Neptunes (sometimes misleadingly called super-Earths). Three cases are shown. Left is the "Hycean Word", in which there is a thin hydrogen & helium atmosphere over a liquid water layer on top of ice X (a high-pressure solid phase of water) over a rock iron core. Center is a "stratified mini-neptune" in which a hydrogen and helium atmosphere sits atop a (non-liquid) water-rich hydrogen layer, with a rock-iron core beneath. This is analogous to our best guess for the structures of Uranus and Neptune. Right is the "Miscible-envelope" case, in which there is only a hydrogen, helium & water layer all mixed together on top of a rock-iron core. The paper posits that warmer planets tend towards the latter cases (more mixed) and colder planets tend towards the earlier cases (more stratified, possibility of a water ocean). This figure is from Benneke et al. (2024), which covered the planet TOI-270 d, which is similar to K2-18 b.
April 17, 2025 at 6:31 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
This is what K2-18 b actually looks like in all likelihood -- bluish tint, white clouds, and no land masses or discernible water layer.

If there is a liquid water layer, it's likely too deep under the atmosphere to see clearly. As for a water ocean...
An image of a planet orbiting a reddish star. The planet is blue with long white clouds covering most of the surface, and hints of bands of other clouds beneath. You can't really tell from looking at it if there's a surface or not. There is a second planet also orbiting the star in the background. This image is by ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser.
April 17, 2025 at 6:31 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Oh I think I saw a documentary about that once!
A picture of a Kaiju from the movie Pacific Rim
April 17, 2025 at 6:06 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Meme's like this one are fun because they do highlight the problem with the "gender := sex" position transphobes implicitly hold (but refuse to examine), that intersex people exist; however, really it is values and not biology that decide how we treat someone that feels like a woman/man/etc.
[3/3]
A meme depicting a cartoon character labeled "Transphobes" reaching out happily towards a blob labeled "basic biology". In the second panel, a blob with eyes and a mouth labeled "Advanced biology" reaches out to grab them, and they look nervous about it.
March 26, 2025 at 9:38 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Please enjoy this slide from my thesis :)
A diagram of the solar system planets by NASA JPL / Kevin M. Gill. The title is "Before Exoplanets". Pluto is crossed out as "not a planet", the rocky planets are crossed out as "basically debris" and the remaining planets are labeled as "2 gas giants" (Jupiter and Saturn) and "2 ice giants" (Uranus and Neptune.
March 14, 2025 at 5:27 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Elon picked a fight with the commander of the International Space Station and now wants to de-orbit the station early out of pettiness. I don't think either of those things is going to be popular.
A screenshot of twitter with three tweets. Elon Musk says "It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_station. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let's go to Mars" Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) replies "Are you suggesting that the ISS be deorbited prior to 2030? As you know, SpaceX currently [h]as a contract to build the US Deorbit Vehicle to safely bring the station down in 2030." Musk says "The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I recommend 2 years from now."
February 20, 2025 at 6:57 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Seriously, this is getting worse than when everybody started calling the cops about aliens because Venus and Jupiter were lined up near sunset.
A screenshot of a Twitter quote tweet. The quoted tweet has a blurry video frame of a blob of red, green, and white lights. The tweet says "Saw one tonight. This is not a joke. 🛸 about ten minutes before arrival at LaGuardia. This seems a little close to the flight path, no??" The quoting tweet says "UFO report: the craft had standard red and green navigation lights and a bright light landing light and it was descending towards LaGuardia. Could be some kind of interdimensional transport orb"
December 15, 2024 at 9:59 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Obligatory:
December 15, 2024 at 6:29 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
To essentially every game studio:
A meme from Spiderman (2002) in which Mary Jane tells Peter Parker "Tell me the truth, I'm ready to hear it." In this meme, Peter replies "Your game doesn't need a launcher." Mary Jane begins to cry.
December 9, 2024 at 3:00 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
They've managed to get a radial-velocity mass measurement of a planet with only 56 cm/s of wobble from the star!
www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

Extremely impressive
A scene from Jurrasic park, in which Jeff Goldblum's character Ian Malcolm sees the dinosaurs for the first time and exclaims "You did it. you crazy son of a bitch, you did it"
October 1, 2024 at 6:53 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Just Elsevier things.

[OOTL: Elsevier is an old for-profit academic publishing company.]
A screenshot from a website, reading "Purchase options at the top". One option is listed, a DRM-free ebook (PDF or EPUB3) for the low, low price of $8,984.00. A handy add-to-cart icon fills out the bottom of the screenshot.
September 16, 2024 at 6:31 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
This heaping load of bullshit clickbait is the sort of ad you'd expect to find on some sketchy torrenting website (or Facebook), but I saw it on the Firefox new tab ads. What the fuck Mozilla?

How much you want to bet it was AI generated as well, just to wrap up the shit sandwich?
A screenshot of an ad entitled "Thought-provoking stories". The ad's image is a picture of Saturn with prominent rings. The website has been crossed out with a large red line to avoid giving them free advertising. The title is "Saturn's Majestic Rings will Vanish in Just Six Months From Now". No they fucking won't. A lead-in sentence reads "Saturn's awe-inspiring rings are the most iconic celestial feature in our solar system. They will vanish in about six months from..." and then it cuts off to try to convince you to click it.
September 4, 2024 at 10:44 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
A picture of a cat in a suit at a table with a coffee and newspaper. The cat is staring into space. The title text reads "I should buy some Parmesan cheese"
August 1, 2024 at 5:40 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
I wish this cat a happy welcoming home, but to that end uh... could somebody maybe get a different picture? Because, uh...
May 25, 2024 at 5:44 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Oh yeah agreed, I was just thinking about this hilarious bit of population-level overconfidence:
May 10, 2024 at 6:15 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Jupiter stan here
April 22, 2024 at 6:06 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Just got an ad for Arizona State.
A meme of Darth Vader telling Luke "It is... too late for me, son."
March 13, 2024 at 4:47 AM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Pothos?

Admittedly, they do look nice.
A picture of a pothos plant in a pot indoors.
March 7, 2024 at 9:40 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
Well, I made this one in Inkscape; the learning curve is a bit steep at first, but ultimately it's just a much better version of drawing shapes in PowerPoint. Alternatively I've seen some incredible stuff done with the Python library Manim:
docs.manim.community/en/stable/ex...
A diagram of Saturn compared with the exoplanet WASP-12 b, to scale. Saturn is wider at the equator due to it's rotation, whereas WASP-12 b is pulled into a (symmetric) egg shape facing the star due to stellar tides from being very close to its parent star.
March 3, 2024 at 6:49 PM
dpthorngren.bsky.social
I assume
A picture of Bob the Builder.
January 26, 2024 at 8:29 PM