Chris Lintott

@chrislintott.bsky.social

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Astronomer, writer and zookeeper. Oxford, Gresham and the Zooniverse. The human half of the Dog Stars podcast. New book: 'Our Accidental Universe' out in March (UK) and June (US)

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Ready for some real tennis at Hampton Court on London #pride day. #uptheunicorn #BiInSci

Excellent fun discussing aliens with The Infinite Monkey Cage at #Glastonbury yesterday. Somehow the cast look like the management of Somerset’s second largest leisure centre. Cc @lisakatzenberger.bsky.social @robinince.bsky.social 🧪🔭

Oxford colleagues: In 2020 we voted to abolish the fundamentally inequitable practice of charging £75 just to apply for graduate study. Now, at the last possible moment, this decision could be overturned. Come to congregation tomorrow at 2pm to vote! tinyurl.com/RejectGAF

GAF flysheet_final.docxtinyurl.com

Publication day for ACCIDENTAL ASTRONOMY in North America! Now my friends across the Pond can read about how astronomers stumble into discovering the cosmos. 🔭 🧪

This is on this evening - thanks to the marvellous Sharmanka Kinectic Theatre in Glasgow.

Extraordinary filming venue for Sky at Night today. Anyone know it?

A short piece on the aurora, on the @londonreview.bsky.social blog, featuring a snowy trip to Finland. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/ma...

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Please join me in appreciating this galaxy, which, while technically unremarkable and randomly selected from a database of tens of thousands, is an unimaginably vast and distant structure with its own unique and breathtaking beauty

A barred spiral galaxy, observed with the Apache Point 2.5m Telescope in the SDSS survey. It is at redshift 0.008 (lookback time 114.365 million years) with coordinates (210.08383, 38.91542). This classification was made in the Galaxy Zoo 2 project. 🔭

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Love this one. The X you see in the center is a real feature of some disks. It’s associated with a bar feature, which we’ve seen in some face-on disks on this feed. The bar “buckles” and the orbits rise up and out of the disk on both sides. Edge on, it can make a (sometimes faint) X shape. 🔭

A edge-on disk galaxy, observed with the Apache Point 2.5m Telescope in the SDSS survey. It is at redshift 0.039 (lookback time 549.698 million years) with coordinates (196.19582, 3.90495). This classification was made in the Galaxy Zoo 2 project.

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Ooh, I think I've seen this one in COSMOS-Web (with JWST) and it is even more stunning!

A merger, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in the COSMOS survey. It is at redshift 0.34 (lookback time 3.91 billion years) with coordinates (149.60897, 2.82867). This classification was made in the GZ: Hubble project.

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‘The tides cause friction which slows the Earth’s rotation, and causes the Moon to recede from us by four centimetres a year: in half a billion years’ time, the Moon’s shadow will touch down on Earth for the last time.’ @chrislintott.bsky.social on the eclipse: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Chris Lintott · Short Cuts: Total Eclipsewww.lrb.co.uk As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the...

Extraordinary filming venue for Sky at Night today. Anyone know it?

Another in my new favourite time of photo: ‘Our Accidental Universe’ out in the wild. Happy publication day to me!

First copy of ‘Our Accidental Universe’ out in the wild! Still time for a preorder…

I was not expecting this until later in the week. Such a pretty cover to @chrislintott.bsky.social’s new book!! The planetary astronomer in me is loving the streaking meteor/impactor on the cover. I’m on the first chapter aptly titled “Is It Aliens?” I highly recommend you buy your own copy. 🔭 🧪

I wrote a thing, which is mostly for me. It's long, because I don't know how to make it short, and it's about football clubs and the plight of mine. tinyurl.com/torquaytilli...

Torquay till I dietinyurl.com

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Oh my meteors, thank you @chrislintott.bsky.social! I needed something to replace social media in my life... www.livemeteors.com

About to go live for my next @GreshamCollege lecture: come hear about the radio sky: YouTube.com/watch?v=7mWI... 📡 🛰️ 🔭

Live meteor radio echoeswww.livemeteors.com Listen live to meteor pings while they strike Earth's atmosphere. Turn on the volume, watch and enjoy.

About to go live for my next @GreshamCollege lecture: come hear about the radio sky: YouTube.com/watch?v=7mWI... 📡 🛰️ 🔭

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I commend this book to your attention! I got a sneak preview and it's fab.

It is astounding to me that sometimes I get to sit and write about the universe, more surprising that I manage to do so, and ever more floored when it becomes a book that turns up in a box. 🧪 📡 🔭

I have a new paper out this week, led by Matthew Hopkins & @astrokiwi.bsky.social predicting the properties of interstellar objects - visitors from other Solar Systems which pass through our own. The paper has all the detail, but let me explain a little here. (1/n)

Predicting Interstellar Object Chemodynamics with Gaiaarxiv.org The interstellar object population of the Milky Way is a product of its stars. However, what is in fact a complex structure in the Solar neighbourhood has traditionally in ISO studies been described as smoothly distributed. Using a debiased stellar population derived from the Gaia DR3 stellar sample, we infer that the velocity distribution of ISOs is far more textured than a smooth Gaussian. The moving groups caused by Galactic resonances dominate the distribution. 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov have entirely normal places within these distributions; 1I is within the non-coeval moving group that includes the Matariki (Pleiades) cluster, and 2I within the Coma Berenices moving group. We show that for the composition of planetesimals formed beyond the ice line, these velocity structures also have a chemodynamic component. This variation will be visible on the sky. We predict that this richly textured distribution will be differentiable from smooth Gaussians in samples that are within the expected discovery capacity of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Solar neighbourhood ISOs will be of all ages and come from a dynamic mix of many different populations of stars, reflecting their origins from all around the Galactic disk.

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Bubbly spirals. One of the most unexpected things from JWST so far!

Have you seen these bonkers JWST images of nearby galaxies from the PHANGS team? Absolutely stunning! esawebb.org/news/weic2403/

The best sandwich in the world involves bacon, salmon and mango chutney. Truth: www.theguardian.com/food/2020/oc...

Simon Hopkinson’s bacon du bedatwww.theguardian.com The idea of a toasted sandwich with bacon, smoked salmon and mango chutney is curious, but surprisingly delicious

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"It is the moon, I ken her horn, That's blinkin' in the lift sae hie; She shines sae bright to wyle us hame, But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee!" 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Happy Burns Night🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 📷:@TomDuffinPhotos. 🧪🔭

My contribution to the tea discourse is that my interview years ago in Cambridge involved the question: If you’re making a cup of tea and want it to be as hot as possible when you drink it in five minutes time, do you put the milk in now, or then?

This is vandalism. The Wolbach has been an inspiration for all of astronomy, helping us understand what role a library can play in modern research, reaching out to new communities and providing a unique and admired resource for anyone at the CfA. What on Earth is going on that they can’t see that?

Yesterday the director’s office at the CfA announced their decision to close the Wolbach Library, the largest astronomy library in the world. The decision appears primarily budgetary, w several staff losing their jobs, and most resources moving to the Harvard library 🔭🧪🎢

Secret live link for my talk on ‘Oumuamua at Gresham. Starting at 6 GMT: youtube.com/live/RXNJdaz...

Astronomers on Bluesky: come join us at the 13th dotAstro conference at ESAC in Madrid. dotAstro is a inclusive gathering of astronomers from all backgrounds, and at all career stages, who are passionate about how technology and the web can transform our science. Do come if you can. 🛰️🔭

.Astronomy 13 — .Astronomywww.dotastronomy.com

New paper day!

" The weird and the wonderful in our Solar System: Searching for serendipity in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time " (Brian Rogers, @chrislintott.bsky.social et al in press)

The weird and the wonderful in our Solar System: Searching for...arxiv.org We present a novel method for anomaly detection in Solar System object data, in preparation for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. We train a deep autoencoder for anomaly detection and use the...

Astronomers: Do you want a postdoc fellowship working on broad topics related to SETI? Fancy joining us in Oxford? Breakthrough Listen fellowships now advertised here: tinyurl.com/BLFellows24 (I'm very keen to work with anyone interested in ML/anomaly detection, so ping me if you have questions) 🛰️🔭

New Orleans - for #AAS243 - was scientifically a blast. But the city remains amazing. So much good music (wjblues.com yoshitakaz2tsuji.bandcamp.com) & so much good food. Stand out: the blackened redfish at Coop's Place (www.coopsplace.net) which I had a decade ago, and have been craving ever since.

At some point Astronomy conferences organisers are going to learn to put the machine learning sessions in bigger rooms. AAS243 having the same problem we had at NAM2023 🛰️ 📡