Dr. Jessie Christiansen Profile picture
NASA Planet Hunter | Project Scientist NASA Exoplanet Archive | @TEDFellow | Science consultant | General Nerd | My views are not the views of NASA | She/her
Mar 21, 2021 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.
Sep 16, 2020 13 tweets 6 min read
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.
Sep 14, 2020 6 tweets 3 min read
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.
Jun 16, 2020 20 tweets 5 min read
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.
Jan 14, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read
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.)
Dec 22, 2019 13 tweets 3 min read
Now, all the way through!

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

theguardian.com/science/2019/n…
Sep 11, 2019 10 tweets 4 min read
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.
Feb 1, 2019 75 tweets 28 min read
Let’s do it. Goals of workshop:
1) What is the current state of the field - what do we already know?
2) What are the funded near-future plans? What might we know soon?
3) What are the potential future advances that could be important?
4) How can NASA help?