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Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
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21 Mar, 5 tweets, 1 min read
The Iceland volcano looks beautiful at night on the live feed, and is very active right now!

ruv.is/frett/2021/03/…
If you look reeeeeeally closely, you can see a small hobbit carrying another one up the side.
Seriously though it's going full Mount Doom right now.
It's like a fireworks factory exploding at the top.
Waiting for the lava to creep off the side of the field of view with the same intensity that The Office employees were watching the TV screensaver.

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More from @aussiastronomer

Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
16 Sep 20
We have a new exoplanet announcement this morning – no, it’s not phosphine, or aliens!!! :D It’s the first planet found orbiting a white dwarf host star!

Okay what does that mean and why is it cool (literally and figuratively!).

nature.com/articles/s4158…
White dwarfs are remnant cores of stars like the Sun after they’ve used up all their hydrogen and helium. Our Sun will become a white dwarf in ~5 billion years, or what will feel like roughly another two months of 2020.

Time is relative.
The inner planets (Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth) will be engulfed as the star balloons up to a red giant, rapidly burning through its remaining reserves of fuel. Then it will puff off those outer layers to become a planetary nebulae!
Read 13 tweets
Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
14 Sep 20
Okay, here's what I told folks who asked about the detection of phosphine (PH3) in the atmosphere of Venus: If you give me the options of unknown chemistry, unknown geology, or unknown biology, then biology is always going to be a distant third behind the other two options.
We see phosphine in other places in the solar system, and it's not biological. Now, terrestrial planets are not the same as gas giants, for sure! But I think we're a ways away from ruling out chemistry and geology as sources of phosphine.
And honestly, with an extraordinary claim like extraterrestrial life, you do have to 100% rule out every other possible origin.

Here's the terribly poorly-kept-secret article!

Read 6 tweets
Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
16 Jun 20
I had a long chat this morning with a counsellor from the Caltech Staff and Faculty Consultation Center. The last three months have been A LOT, for many of us. I wanted to share what I found helpful. This post is for anyone else new to managing anxiety.
There will be nothing new here for people who have dealt with this before. And I don't know if any of this is helpful long-term yet. But, it was helpful even in the moment to have more information, and to feel like there were possible solutions, so I wanted to share them.
(I specifically enjoyed how the counsellors at Caltech, who must deal with a lot of stressed scientists, were like "Okay, let's break this down. It's SCIENCE. Here's the chemistry. Here's the biology. Here's how you hack them.”)
Read 20 tweets
Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
14 Jan 20
In case your local astronomer seems agitated, the big dog gravitational wave detector @LIGO just detected an ‘unknown or unanticipated’ burst of gravitational waves somewhere deep in space. 👀
It’s fairly well localized, so you can bet everyone with a telescope has pointed it at that little patch of sky right now.

(@d_a_howell points out that it’s located pretty close to behaving-oddly-of-late superstar Betelgeuse.)
In case you’re wondering, lots of telescopes have ‘Target of Opportunity’ programs. Instead of getting scheduled time, folks can override whoever is on the telescope (YES EVEN IN THE MIDDLE OF A TRANSIT) if something super cool happens, and repoint it wherever they want.
Read 4 tweets
Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
22 Dec 19
Now, all the way through!

On the twelfth day of Christmas, astronomy gave me to me...
Twelve billion miles!

theguardian.com/science/2019/n…
Apollo 11 celebrations!

washingtonpost.com/apollo11/
Read 13 tweets
Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
11 Sep 19
GUYS. Two independent announcements today of the same thing: We have found water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18 b!

BUT WAIT?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
K2-18 b is not a rocky planet. So that's a bummer. But it IS in the 'habitable' zone of its star, meaning under certain assumptions the temperature is right for liquid water on the surface on the planet.

BUT.
K2-18 b is massive enough (about 8 times the mass of the Earth) that it has a thick, deep, gaseous atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Very, very unlike our atmosphere.
Read 10 tweets

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