Dr Joanna Barstow
banner
drjovian.bsky.social
Dr Joanna Barstow
@drjovian.bsky.social
STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the Open University. Astromum x 2. FRAS. Christian, singer, bookworm, musical theatre super fan.
Great corset. Having never worn one, closest I’ve come is my wedding dress which had a very structured bodice but was adjusted to fit me - is it not horribly uncomfortable?
October 21, 2025 at 8:35 AM
I’m definitely with you there! Innovation requires brains that have learned to think creatively. If we outsource our thinking to computers what will that result in long term?
October 9, 2025 at 8:46 AM
Absolutely. Writing good papers also requires creativity IMO. At the end of the day it’s all about storytelling.
October 9, 2025 at 8:40 AM
That was my immediate reaction too Chris. Sure, it’s expected in hydrogen dominated atmospheres for certain temperatures (so seeing it in a brown dwarf is cool but far from shocking). It’s still very much not expected in a CO2 or N2 dominated atmosphere. Caution always good, but context important!
October 7, 2025 at 7:56 PM
It turns out the mob sing: ‘We don’t like what we don’t understand - in fact it scares us .’ Followed shortly after by cries to bring guns/knives and kill the Beast.

I feel like these lyrics are pretty key to the current shitshow we live in. Also, Howard Ashman was a genius.
September 18, 2025 at 9:07 AM
I don’t think there is an official repository yet. It would be excellent if it was part of the NASA Exoplanet archive but I think that would require an awful lot of investment they probably can’t make at the moment.
August 22, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Interstellar cheese? I think we all know who we need to investigate this…
a cartoon character is sitting in a chair and says `` we 've forgotten the crackers '' .
Alt: GIF of Wallace in A Grand Day Out waving his hands in horror at the realisation: ‘We’ve forgotten the crackers!’
media.tenor.com
August 22, 2025 at 2:15 PM
It’s about the difficulties a younger sibling has with everything the family does being about his brother. It might not all be a comfortable watch. But it is very well done.
August 10, 2025 at 7:30 PM
There was a TV drama a few years ago called Coming Down the Mountain that was very good. Not sure if it was ever a book.
August 10, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Gupta: warmer planet T-p profiles lie completely in the miscible region. As a planet cools, eventually it will intersect the critical curve, and condensate clouds will emerge. Later there is deep 'rainfall' inside the planet, leading to water deep in the interior. TOI-270d too hot for this! #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Gupta: these simulations can help determine the critical curve defining the regions of pressure-temperature space where water is miscible in all proportions, and regions where hydrogen and water are only partially miscible. Uranus and Neptune have T-p profiles strikingly close to this curve. #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Gupta: insights into atmosphere-interior interactions are critical for interpreting HWO data. Lab experiments at relevant conditions are very hard though! Quantum mechanical methods (ab initio molecular dynamics) can help us understand interactions between hydrogen and water. #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Gialluca: however, there are big errors on estimated crater size with impactor energy. We need to do much more impact testing to understand this better. We therefore don't want a ~25 planet sample, this might end up being reduced by 50%, so we need contingency/conservative sample sizes #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Gialluca: in general impactors only start affecting yield if the energy is greater than 0.2 J. For a ~26J impactor similar to the JWST C3 impactor, this could result in a ~30% reduction in yield. #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Having a telescope barrel reduces stray light in two ways, it minimises the risk of impacts and minimises incident stray light from background sources. For high energy impactors, the background source improvement isn't that great, but it does protect against impacts happening in the 1st place #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Gialluca: this work provides order of magnitude estimates of stray light from these rare, high energy impact events. Two models exist for predicting crater size for a given impact - give different answers, so we have an optimistic to pessimistic range of possible sizes. #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Wolff: shorter correlated noise lengthscales produce the widest posteriors, and shortest lengthscales match the width of absorption lines. E.g. oxygen posteriors can be biased here. PSF chromaticity produces correlated noise at these length scales. This will be a limiting noise source for HWO #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Wolff: speckle noise can be modelled using Gaussian processes, simply specified by an amplitude and length scale. Failing to model correlated noise in retrievals biases and artificially narrows posteriors. Most retrieval studies for HWO trade space do not yet account for speckle noise. #HWO25
July 31, 2025 at 9:21 PM