Patrick Tamburo
@tamburo.bsky.social
150 followers 140 following 37 posts
Tierras postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. https://patricktamburo.github.io/ https://sites.harvard.edu/tierras-observatory/
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tamburo.bsky.social
SO PROUD OF MY (FUTURE*) WIFE @sierragrant.bsky.social

*FUTURE MEANING SUNDAY
stsci.edu
#NASAWebb has found the first direct evidence of potential moon formation around a giant exoplanet. The discovery is shedding light on how such systems evolve and why moons could be potentially habitable worlds: https://bit.ly/46xGodN 🔭 🧪
An illustration of a young planet with a surrounding disk of dust and gas potentially forming moons. The planet, which appears dark red, is shown at lower right, circled by a cloudy, clumpy reddish orange-colored disk. The host star appears at upper left, and glows yellow, with its own reddish disk of debris. The disk that surrounds the planet takes up about half the illustration. The black background of space is speckled with stars. At the bottom of the illustration, graphics of molecules are listed in the following order: Acetylene, Carbon Dioxide, Ethane, Benzene, Hydrogen cyanide. The words Artist’s Concept appear at upper right.
tamburo.bsky.social
🪐🔭 JWST is letting us learn about disks around PLANETARY-MASS OBJECTS!!!
sierragrant.bsky.social
Today is a special paper day for me: for the first time we can do chemistry in a circumplanetary disk around a planetary-mass companion! Gabriele Cugno and I used JWST to tease out the signal of CT Cha b, finding a rich carbon chemistry (7 molecules + 1 isotopolog detected)! arxiv.org/abs/2509.15209
tamburo.bsky.social
Now published in AJ! Get in here this system is crazy iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Reposted by Patrick Tamburo
sierragrant.bsky.social
Another MINDS JWST paper! We explore the stark transition from H2O-dominated spectra in Sun-like systems to the carbon-rich chemistry seen for low-mass objects. We don't know exactly what is driving this trend, but we explore the possibilities that may be acting in concert.
arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04692
Reposted by Patrick Tamburo
philipmuirhead.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr. Allison McCarthy, who successfully defended her PhD “The Physical Basis for L and T Dwarf Variability” on Friday! Allie is now off to Trinity College Dublin for a postdoc with the ExoAimsir group led by Prof. Johanna Vos! 🪐🔭 @alliemccarthy.bsky.social @johannavos.bsky.social
tamburo.bsky.social
New paper on arxiv! My colleague Juliana García-Mejía analyzed data from several facilities searching for a transit of the long-period (542 d) super puff HIP 41378 f. The full transit is 19 hours long, but we detected it using a few "snapshots" from multiple observatories.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.20907
A light curve showing a transit of HIP 41378 f. The data span three nights and were taken with multiple facilities. On the second night, the data from four different facilities are decremented by approximately the transit depth expected for HIP 41378 f.
tamburo.bsky.social
And here's the 40-degree spherical harmonic expansion of my cat 😭😭😭
tamburo.bsky.social
Just found out starry (starry.readthedocs.io/en/v1.1.0/) lets you project any image you want onto a sphere, so here's the 40-degree spherical harmonic expansion of Jupiter. 🪐🔭
tamburo.bsky.social
Agreed! And I think it will be very informative to watch how the spot(s) evolve over the coming years
tamburo.bsky.social
Thank you Johanna! :)
tamburo.bsky.social
This work has been submitted to AJ and we welcome any comments! #exoplanets ⭐🪐🔭
tamburo.bsky.social
We simultaneously modeled several transit observations, finding that the rotational light curve AND the changes in the transit shapes can be described by a planet transiting a large polar spot.
tamburo.bsky.social
We used 124 nights from the Tierras Observatory (sites.harvard.edu/tierras-obse...) to measure the star's rotation period, which is 11 days.
A light curve of TOI-3884 b showing its 11-day rotation period.
tamburo.bsky.social
TOI-3884 b is a planet around an M dwarf whose transits show persistent spot crossings. We show that the star's rotational and spot-crossing variations can be modeled with a misaligned planet transiting a large polar spot (confirming last week's results from Mori et al.)
arxiv.org/abs/2506.11998
tamburo.bsky.social
Now published in AJ! We used Tierras to measure the 23-day rotation period of a K dwarf and found that the orbit of its transiting planet is aligned with the star's spin axis. Stay tuned as we measure true obliquities for a larger sample!

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
tamburo.bsky.social
The Tierras Observatory i̶s̶ ̶ was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. AST-2308043.
Reposted by Patrick Tamburo
johannavos.bsky.social
🚨🚨 I'm hiring!!! 🚨🚨

Postdoc and PhD positions available to join my ERC project Exo-PEA at @tcddublin.bsky.social. The project aims to understand weather in giant extrasolar worlds ☁️⚡🪐

📆 Deadline: Jan 6th

Postdoc ad: tinyurl.com/2ufcwvxf
PhD ad: tinyurl.com/5amcea6p

Please share widely! 🔭🪐
tinyurl.com
tamburo.bsky.social
Meteor caught on Whipple Observatory sky cameras last night 🪐🔭
tamburo.bsky.social
Recently implemented Sicko Mode™ on Tierras 🔭🪐