Matthew Kenworthy

Normalise emailing people to say you read and enjoyed their work. Academia can be a bleak conveyorbelt of endless negative feedback. Sometimes it's hard to know whether anyone values your work. That's why it means so much when someone takes the time to message and say so! Be that person.

I am ashamed to say I burst out laughing at this quote: "Well, my wife says that I’m emotionally dead, but I’m not." Go read the whole interview, it's humbling.

Before the flood: Destriez+ on “Searching for substellar companion candidates with Gaia V. M dwarfs within 15 parsec…" incorporates RV and direct imaging constraints to pick out 32 new substellar candidates… and Gaia Data Release 4 is just around the corner too… #exoplanets #astrodon

If nothing else, two fun facts you might not already know: (1) The Tragedy of The Commons is a specific, essentially wrong paper by a guy who turns out to suck, and (2) exploitative scholarly publishing is basically traceable to one guy, Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine.

I read it this morning, it's a good read - I suggest other academics read it and look at the concept of "enclosure", I'd not heard of that before. I also appreciate the last paragraph in the Acknowledgements :)

I'd forgotten that aspect... and yet they will still want the validation from real scientists.

I say upsilon Andromedae d, you say epsilon Eridani b: two papers on direct imaging exoring detection with the Roman space telescope by Lane et al. and Hasler et al. - rings can boost the reflected light signal by a factor > 3, and light curve senses the ring geometry! #astrodon #exoplanets

Do not taunt Super Happy Fun Car.

Oddly enough the most important part of Linus' missive isn't highlighted at all - for me it is "...I expect people to understand what they are doing." That, right there, is the whole fricking point.

I know a friend who feels they are seen in this post.

Poetry Corner So. Farewell Then Leap second. Cause of joy And agony For all timekeepers everywhere. Now we will have Leap hours instead. Which will not cause Any problems whatsoever. Obviously. E.J. Thribb (17.5 != TAI-UTC) BIPM resolution #astrodon #astronomy #NoLeapSecond #exoplanets

Us: "Hi hardware store clerk, do you bother to check if all your extra large transport trolleys are returned every night?" GAMMA clerk: "....errr, not usually. Why do you ask?" Us (quickly): "Oh, nothing! Nothing really!"

This is a very exciting and elegant result, congratulations to the whole team!

Walking past Sint Jacobskerk in Den Haag the other day I double-taked at the three big seashells on the ground, I’m assuming the artist really liked “Demolition Man” :) #ThreeSeashells

I’m old enough that I don’t like leaving the media players on my computer desktop on “pause” because that will stretch and ultimately break the tape in the cassette deck. #OldSkool #Dinosaur

I had an absolutely fantastic time talking about colliding exoplanets as part of Pints of Knowledge at Big Penny Social in Walthamstow, and spent over half an hour answering many excellent questions from the audience! #exoplanets #astrodon #outreach

One day I'm going to do an archaeology of anechoic chambers 🏺🧪🔭

Posters from the Dutch Stop de Kindermoord ("Stop the Child Murder") movement of the 1970s

I shuddered because this is too accurate, and I because I recognise the page from Transmetropolitan, where the Smiler simply... tunes out of the conversation that's happening around him. Too close for comfort.

Jeffrey Archer has died - here is the obituary of Monica Coghlan www.heraldscotland.com/news/1216989...

This was posted on LinkedIn. Looks like a new record, possibly 3500 proposals. Good luck everyone on the JWST roulette. We really should have made two.

\vspace this, \vspace that, I just want data from the James Webb \vspace Telescope!

Good luck to everyone submitting their #JWST proposals today. My first version is in the bag, now to read it and find the O(dozens) of mistakes I made…. Scientific method FTW! #exoplanet #astrodon

The number of times I've taken off my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose keeps going up and up....

In memoriam Frank Israel (1946 – 2026) www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/in-me... English: www.astronomie.nl/nieuws/en/in... 🔭

Witnesses say his belch was continuous and loud for almost four minutes.

I was one of the people interviewed for this article in Bristol Magazine and I spoke a bit about attitudes towards space science among the young people I've met through my work. thebristolmag.co.uk/space-expert...

"We're in Hell, Netley. Hell."

Congratulations to the whole team for this, I know people have been trying for a while to get radio emission from an exoplanet but it's fantastic to finally get a solid location and confirmation!

I remember visiting that place last year, or was it three years ago?

“I WILL NOT GO TO CHAT WITH YOU BABS I CAST YOU OUT UNCLEAN SPIRIT IN THE NAME OF-”

First radio emission detection for an exoplanet? Interpreted as aurora (and hence a magnetic field for the planet). Ortiz Ceballos+ arxiv.org/abs/2609.16720 🧪🔭 #exoplanets

I now have to pause when replying to a slightly weird/clueless comment on social media, because it may be a bot and this is simply a training gambit for some #ChatGPT word salad farm somewhere.

Happy tenth anniversary (+ 2 days) to @weratedogs.com for helping both Brênt and the rest of us understand that they are all good dogs.

Oh, great. Now I'll be spending my whole week muttering "Wine O'Horse" under my breath on the bus, at the airport, at faculty meetings....

Having genuine terrors wondering how many wall socket power supplies can (safely!) deliver 240 W...

Location saved for next time I'm visiting Oxford....

Ben Elton basically called it in his novel "Stark" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_(...

Every time the chair of a meeting says “I’m sure we don’t need to take the full 90 minutes” at the start of the meeting, my left eyelid starts twitching uncontrollably until the end of the meeting some two hours later.

Also my view on driverless cars, AI + harmful algorithms is if the tech billionaires wanted me to trust them on this, maybe they shouldn't have adopted "move fast and break things" as their motto!

Just a normal camera, if “normal” means: 🔭 A 3.2-billion-pixel sensor 🌌 A field of view that could fit ~45 full Moons ⏱️ A new 8-gigabyte image every ~40 seconds NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera is the largest ever built (thanks SLAC!). Ok, maybe that's not normal. 🔭🧪

Great to read BBC Sky At NIght interview with Cyrielle Opitom (@physicsastronomyed.bsky.social) on why comet 3I/ATLAS is a big deal. There's also a nod to how @vrubinobs.bsky.social can help us better understand interstellar objects 🔭 www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/3i-atla...