JJ Hermes

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

6/10

The solar radiation pressure at Earth is about the same as a mosquito landing on 1 m^2 trampoline, so totally negligible! Any boosts in orbit were from Space Shuttle servicing missions, marked with SM on the plots.

At its worst near October 2024 HST was losing more than 0.6 km every week. In January 2026 that was down to less than 0.4 km every week.

Last year (across all of 2025) HST dropped more than 23 km in its orbit, which is >40% of all of its altitude loss over the last decade!

This should be getting better as we leave solar maximum. Here's an update of HST altitude vs. sunspot number.

If you were dropped at a random point in the Milky Way, there is a less than one in a hundred billion chance (1 in 100,000,000,000) that you'd ever have enough starlight to read a book.

That's great to hear!

Pour one out for the graduate students who got railroaded by GRFP suddenly dropping eligibility for 2nd-year graduate students and a no-show FINESST call IN THE SAME YEAR.

Certainly doesn't rise to the level of victim names and photos that Justice didn't redact, but I would hope(?) there's a mechanism to have things like that removed if not redacted

It's awkward to see confidential letters of recommendation for these awards that are fully unredacted in the files.

It's possible Lou Baya's results give support to the work of @kenshen.bsky.social, Simon Blouin, and @katiebreivik.bsky.social that the Q branch WDs come from (wider) mergers of WD with subgiants (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ApJ....). Lots still to do to understand these funny stars! (7/7)

We also found pulsations in two new DAQ stars. One is hotter than 15,500 K, potentially pushing pulsations into a regime where standard H-convection driving shouldn’t work, hinting at either an extension of the DAV picture or a distinct DAQV instability strip! (6/7)

We measured surface properties for all Q-branch WDs within 100 pc, and those with the largest cooling delays do not appear to be strongly magnetic, nor show evidence of fast rotation. Either they are not WD+WD mergers, or they somehow lost their magnetism and angular momentum. (5/7)

The required Ne enrichment is often linked to WD+WD mergers. However, those events should leave clear fingerprints: rapid rotation from angular momentum conservation and strong magnetic fields from dynamo action in the merger remnant. Lou Baya's observations don't see that! (4/7)

The leading explanation is energy release during crystallization. As the C/O core begins to freeze, neutron-rich 22Ne is preferentially excluded from the solid; it separates, enriching the remaining liquid, which then sinks. That settling releases lots of energy! (3/7)

White dwarfs are supposed to cool predictably with age, but a population called Q-branch WDs pile up at luminosities where they should be rarer. Sihao Cheng, who discovered these stalled stars, has some great animations showing this effect (sihaocheng.github.io/Qbranch/). (2/7)

White Dwarf Merger Remnants with Cooling Delays on the Q Branch Lack Strong Magnetism A population of anomalous ultra-massive white dwarfs discovered with Gaia, often referred to as the Q branch, show high (multi-Gyr) cooling delays produced by exotic physical mechanisms. They are beli...

Great result from BU graduate student @lbor.bsky.social hit the arXiv today shedding light on the origins of strange white dwarfs that have stopped cooling for billions of years: "WD Merger Remnants with Cooling Delays on the Q Branch Lack Strong Magnetism" arxiv.org/abs/2602.02670 (1/7)

Oh this is not about proposals. It's that thing when you make comments on a defunct .tex file in a manuscript because the old one you've commented on before opens by default.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center hit by significant downsizing – Physics World The centre has closed a third of its buildings over the past few months

Weird also to have most employees at Goddard go unpaid for 43 days, while stressing they may not have an office to come back to after it was over. physicsworld.com/a/nasas-godd...

Comet 3I/ATLAS Multimedia - NASA Science NASA missions are working together to track and study this rare, interstellar comet as it passes through our solar system. Find images and other media resources here.

Are there any directives or memos within NASA that we go all hands on deck following this up that mention Avi? I see sites like this (science.nasa.gov/solar-system...) and some cynical part of me wonders why the Europa Clipper is trying to look at a comet?!

You might’ve heard the news: SpaceX just passed 10,000 Starlink satellites launched. And that number is already old news, as there’s now a new Starlink batch launched every other day. Here’s what that looks like in a short animation of Comet A6 Lemmon courtesy of Michael Jaeger:

I will be using non-standard Unicode characters to write out words like undеrreprеsented (with Cyrillic е) to avoid automated keyword flags. Happy 2025.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

And a new EO late last month (www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...) reclassifies NASA employees in a way that instantly stripped them of their union representation. Goddard plays a huge role for NASA and it is being kneecapped by the Trump administration.

Was there any notice of this change disallowing second years from applying? This is a total blindside from my end....

My personal expectation is that no matter what Congress does there are high-level personnel in place now at the NSF and NASA that can and will chose to operate at fractional funding levels to match the president's budget request. Why capitulate when the harms are probably already baked in?

Not an endorsement, but here's a concise counterpoint to keeping the government open: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

You don’t rely on your calculator to THINK. Over-reliance on AI is putting a developing brain on autopilot.

Billions wasted, mysteries unsolved: The missions NASA may be forced… Proposed NASA cuts would cancel dozens of space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries.

Here are all the missions that face cancellation as part of a devastating 47% cut to NASA's science program.
www.planetary.org/articles/bil...