Peter Gao

It's (belated) paper day! Emeline Fromont (Ph.D student @umdscience.bsky.social) simulated the atmospheric dynamics and cloud microphysics of WASP-43b, finding that nightside-only clouds provide a good fit to both the HST and MIRI spectra as well as the MIRI phase curve: arxiv.org/abs/2610.30243.

4 yo is learning about planets 4 yo: do you know the planet that’s blue and green? Me: you mean Earth? 4 yo: yes! What is all the blue? Me: oceans! 4 yo: yes! And the green is slime Me: uhh pretty sure the green is forests 4 yo: yes, and slime too Me: ok

this may be the coolest thing I ever put on video

Cloud burst

Watched Elio for the first time and nobody told me there was a Kate Mulgrew voice cameo within the first 10 minutes talking about the Voyager probes??

#JWSTC6 APT has crashed with ~8 minutes before the deadline tonight. Chatter says the deadline will be extended but we don't know until when...

@stsci.edu when I add in another \vspace to my proposal

I said I'd do a thread about my new Space Science Reviews paper, so here it is! This is part of a collection of papers arising from a meeting at the International Space Science Institute in Bern in 2024: a workshop to better understand rocky extrasolar planets. A 🧵:

you: on submission 3 of your JWST cycle 6 proposal me: haven’t started writing, haven’t downloaded APT we are not the same

1-800-got-junk makes money by taking your junk to the junk fairy who gives $5 per junk

What’s stopping a gas station from just lowering their price by a buck and getting All The Customers?

luckily no one expects me to be wise thanks to the years I spent carefully crafting a bumbling theorist persona

yesterday was exactly 10 years since I defended my PhD (and the 60th anniversary of Star Trek - not a coincidence) - guess I’m officially mid-career! on a similar note, just a few days earlier I was at a meeting where I was the most senior person, which was slightly upsetting

it’s so funny that a number getting excited turns it into another number

Insane lightning over Ohio, from 37,000 feet, @planetarygao.bsky.social !

I will be announcing a Cycle 1 Call for Proposals for using my pixel shortly

when you write a postdoc ref letter for a student where the PI advertising the position is someone you know well, do you still introduce yourself or can you just go “hey man it’s me let me tell you something”

I’ve been misreading Peltola as Peralta and I am sorry

do you think the scientific community ever gets stressed out when someone with a funny name invents a thing and wants to name it after themselves

slowly introducing fantasy violence to my 7 yo so he can watch LOTR with me before we go see the 2028 eclipse in New Zealand

Almost as cold as the family in Home Alone. Absolute zero Kevin.

imagine if they misspelled Kelvin and used Kevin instead like “the CMB is 3 Kevins” lmao

>arrive back to the US from China extremely jet legged >decides to take an afternoon nap at 4 pm >sets alarm for 5 pm >somehow must’ve woken up at 5 and turned it off then immediately went back to sleep >no memories of this >wakes up at midnight >uh oh

this begs the question: who’s been shitting on our lettuce

I watched Tenet for the first time on the plane to Japan and it took me like 5 hours because I had to rewind and pause constantly to figure out what was going on. I then spent days afterwards reading explainers to fully understand it It’s now one of my favorite movies

what would have happened to human civilization if people hibernated for N months every winter like bears

my main takeaway from being in China is that the close door button on elevators actually work and they expect you to use them

Comet 67P lmao

New Paper Klaxon🚨 I am super excited to share this one which has been 3 years in the making! "Magnesium Silicate Clouds in the Atmosphere of HD 209458b from a Rule-Based Tree-Structured Data Reduction" which is led by Katy Chubb & David Grant Cloud & data 🧵 time #astronomy🔭 #science🧪 1/n

why did they go with gen X instead of a letter earlier in the alphabet? did they not foresee the obvious problem

Look Costco if your return policy is basically “anything goes” then I don’t want to be judged when I return year-old vitamins (that are not expired!)

society: you should keep your eyes on the road when driving also society: HEY LOOK AT THESE GIANT BILLBOARDS

any time they publish one of those maps where a country has insufficient data I’m like why didn’t you collect enough data first before publishing you lazy bum

IAD added new JWST images along one of their halls, including our first WASP-39b spectrum!

That’s where the aliens are

My OCD demands that TESS observe the final missing block as soon as possible. 🧪🔭⭐

radio astronomy is crazy like what do you mean this field of poles and wires is a telescope

you know Noah’s Ark was written by people from the desert because 40 days of nonstop rain is just normal winter in the PNW

sometimes people forget just how small Belgium is

so when the USS Discovery spore jumps do people in the outer saucer gets pinned to the wall like one of those carnival rides

blue wave ❌ blue tsunami ❌ blue wall of water from that black hole planet in Interstellar ✅

squidward??

found out about Artemis II’s splashdown the best way possible: watching a livestream as part of a science fair project at our elementary school GO NASA GO ARTEMIS WOOOO

doing rm -rf / on a bloomberg terminal

they should have front brake lights on cars so I know if an oncoming car is going to stop or run the yellow light when I’m turning left

when you’re an academic and go to a zoom meeting that has to end after 40 minutes because of the time limit

can’t wait to find out if the moon is really haunted

This might be just me, but it’s a bit telling that the best words we apparently have for expressing our awe of the cosmos is still those of Carl Sagan from almost 50 years ago What does this say about our current society, culture, and outlook on science and space exploration?

🔭 Paper day, and it’s a big one! We have found the most metal-poor object known in the universe. It’s a star, and it comes to us from our nearby friend the Large Magellanic Cloud. Out in Nature Astronomy today: rdcu.be/fbylI

Crystal clear ice on the shores of Lake Erie