Yoav Rotman
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yoavrotman.bsky.social
Yoav Rotman
@yoavrotman.bsky.social
560 followers 340 following 77 posts
PhD Candidate 🪐 @ ASU || UMD Astro '22 🐢 || studying exoplanet atmospheres and a big fan of TRAPPIST-1e || sometimes I play the trombone || he/him/הוא || find me on Twitter @Yoav_Rotman
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yoavrotman.bsky.social
Yoav Rotman @yoavrotman.bsky.social · Nov 19
I'm now a third year PhD candidate but everything else still holds true here! Will try to tweet mostly about astronomy though, but no promises 🫡 🔭🧪
yoavrotman.bsky.social Yoav Rotman @yoavrotman.bsky.social · Jul 2
Since there's suddenly an influx here, a reintroduction! I'm Yoav (he/him), and I'm a grad student starting my second year at ASU! I tweet (sorry, skeet?) mostly about exoplanets, D&D, grad student life, food, music, and random shitposts, so feel free to follow if any of those seem mildly amusing
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
aussiastronomer.bsky.social
Hey, astronomers. Can you imagine astronomy research without ADS?!?!? No? So, have you filled out the ADS survey yet?

Help archives help you!

(Help archives keep funding!)

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Astrophysics Data System (ADS) User Feedback Survey
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback on the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) digital library. Your insights will help us improve the platform and better serve the scientific community. All ...
docs.google.com
November 5, 2025 at 7:21 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Ow. #JWSTCycle5
a r2d2 robot is laying in the dirt near a rock
ALT: a r2d2 robot is laying in the dirt near a rock
media.tenor.com
October 16, 2025 at 12:19 AM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
andrasgaspar.bsky.social
The JWST Cycle 5 "Procrastination Monitor", i.e. Molly's proposal counter submission form, is up an running. Please fill it out if you have data to add to it. And do share! #JWSTCycle5

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
JWST Cycle 5 Proposal Procrastination Monitor
An anonymous way to monitor JWST proposal submission times In the email from proposal-submission@stsci, the subject line will be like, "JWST Phase I Proposal 3434 submission 4 received". Here, 3434 =...
docs.google.com
October 14, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
nplinnspace.bsky.social
Do you love WASP-107 b? Do you love making use of *both* ground VLT + space JWST obs to detect molecules in a "warm" (Teq<800K) #exoplanet in transmission, even in a crazy confusing cloudy atmosphere?!

🚨 It's PAPER* DAY! Which means #scicomm thread!

🧵⬇️🔭🪐🧪

*pre-print!

arxiv.org/abs/2508.18964
VLT/CRIRES+ observations of warm Neptune WASP-107 b: Molecular detections and challenges in ground-based transmission spectroscopy of cooler and cloudy exoplanets
Atmospheres of transiting exoplanets can be studied spectroscopically using space-based or ground-based observations. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so there are benefits to both approache...
arxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 10:38 AM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
luckytran.com
NEW: Hundreds of NASA employees have filed a letter of formal dissent.

"We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire."
The Voyager Declaration Dear Interim Administrator Duffy, In light of your recent appointment as Interim NASA Administrator, we bring to your attention recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission. We, the signatories of this letter, dissent from these policies, and raise these concerns because we believe strongly in the importance of NASA's mission, which we are dedicated to uphold. Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully. Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire. Our Shared Commitment to Dissentin� Opinions We share a commitment to dissenting views in accordance with NASA Policy Directive 1000.0C, NASA supports full and open discussion of issues of any nature (e.g., programmatic, institutional), including alternative and divergent views. Diverse views are to be fostered and respected in an environment of integrity and trust with no suppression or retribution. (NPD 1000.0C, Section 3.5.5) Employees across the agency have raised concerns about recent actions to NASA leadership, yet we remain pressured to implement harmful measures. We choose to write to you directly because: (I) as Interim Administrator, you are the final step in the chain of Technical Authority, and (2) the issues we raise are agency-wide, rather than project-specific. As defined in NASA Procedural Requirement 7120 5F, Formal Dissent is "a substantive disagreement with a decision or action that an indiv… • We dissent to changes to NASA's Technical Authority capacities that are driven by anything other than safety and mission assurance. The culture of organizational silence promoted at NASA over the last six months already represents a dangerous tum away from the lessons learned following the Columbia disaster. Changes to the system of Technical Authority, as suggested would be made in the June 25th NASA Town Hall, should be made only in the interests of improving safety, not in anticipation of future budget cuts. • We dissent to the closing out of missions for which Congress has appropriated funding because it represents a permanent loss of capability to the United States both in space and on Eatlh. Once operational spacecraft are decommissioned, they cannot be turned back on. Additionally, cancelling missions in development threatens to end the next generation of crucial observations. • We dissent to implementing indiscriminate cuts to NASA science and aeronautics research because this will leave the American people without the unique public good that NASA provides. Basic research in space science, aeronautics, and the stewardship of the Earth are inherently governmental functions that cannot and will not be taken up by the private sector. Furthermore, NASA has a nearly threefold return on investment in economic activity, and supports national security by ensuring the United States maintains its lead in science and technology. • We dissent to NASA's non-strategic staffing reductions because they will jeopardize NASA's core mission. Thousands of NASA civil servant employees have already been terminated, resigned or retired early, taking with them highly specialized, irreplaceable knowledge crucial to carrying out NASA's mission. • We dissent to canceling NASA participation in international missions because in doing so, NASA is abandoning America's allies. To date, 55 nations have signed on to the Artemis Accords, and withdrawing support from missions with our long-s… We stand in solidarity with our colleagues at the NIH and EPA who have released similar statements concerning the administration's actions at their respective agencies. We dedicate this letter to Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon. Their legacies underpin every conversation about our shared commitment to safety and dissenting opinions at NASA.
July 21, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
sarahkendrew.bsky.social
Interpretation of #JWST exoplanet transmission spectroscopy hinges on having accurate error bars on the spectra. Correlated noise will come to bite you if you don’t model it appropriately. So this is great and important work, thanks @yoavrotman.bsky.social & al 👇🔭🧪
yoavrotman.bsky.social Yoav Rotman @yoavrotman.bsky.social · Jul 8
Paper day! A 🧵

JWST transmission spectra are showing more and more signs of new exciting physics, which is awesome! But if our models don't take that into account, it can propagate as correlated noise and bias our inferences. What do we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2503.21702

(1/n)
A meme saying "Correlated noise? In my JWST data? It's more likely than you think. FREE GP CHECK!"
July 9, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
luiswel.bsky.social
We need to understand the limits of our models and our data for reliable interpretations of exoplanetary spectra.

First paper by my first PhD student! Happy advisor moment. Congrats @yoavrotman.bsky.social

Check out his paper on the Arxiv and his thread below #exoplanets 🔭
yoavrotman.bsky.social Yoav Rotman @yoavrotman.bsky.social · Jul 8
Paper day! A 🧵

JWST transmission spectra are showing more and more signs of new exciting physics, which is awesome! But if our models don't take that into account, it can propagate as correlated noise and bias our inferences. What do we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2503.21702

(1/n)
A meme saying "Correlated noise? In my JWST data? It's more likely than you think. FREE GP CHECK!"
July 9, 2025 at 2:33 AM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Speaking of which, I'll be presenting this work later today at @exoclimes.bsky.social. Check out my talk at 5:00 if you're interested in learning more!

#ExoclimesVII
yoavrotman.bsky.social Yoav Rotman @yoavrotman.bsky.social · Jul 8
Paper day! A 🧵

JWST transmission spectra are showing more and more signs of new exciting physics, which is awesome! But if our models don't take that into account, it can propagate as correlated noise and bias our inferences. What do we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2503.21702

(1/n)
A meme saying "Correlated noise? In my JWST data? It's more likely than you think. FREE GP CHECK!"
July 8, 2025 at 12:32 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Paper day! A 🧵

JWST transmission spectra are showing more and more signs of new exciting physics, which is awesome! But if our models don't take that into account, it can propagate as correlated noise and bias our inferences. What do we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2503.21702

(1/n)
A meme saying "Correlated noise? In my JWST data? It's more likely than you think. FREE GP CHECK!"
July 8, 2025 at 12:31 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Astro folks, does anyone have any good tips for making conference talk slides? Looking for stuff beyond the usual "don't overclutter" and "spread the information over multiple slides" - any tips about how to make an aesthetically pleasing, easy to follow deck?
June 27, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
planetarysociety.bsky.social
Need data to explain the disastrous proposed cuts to NASA?
Here are seven charts that lay out why The White House’s FY2026 budget proposal poses a historic threat to NASA. www.planetary.org/articles/nas...
NASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in seven charts
The White House has put forward a radical, wasteful proposal for NASA. We have the data to prove it.
www.planetary.org
June 10, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
astrobites.bsky.social
From Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social : This post summarizes the proposed major cuts to NASA and the NSF and the impacts they would have, and provides resources to help fight back against this wasteful and unnecessary attack on science. 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/06/02/b...
NSF and NASA Budget Requests Pose an Unprecedented Threat to Astronomy
The president's budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. This post summarizes the major cuts and the impacts they would have, and provides resources to help fight back against thi...
astrobites.org
June 2, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
ohdearz.bsky.social
Here is the updated version of the FY26 president's proposed #NASA astrophysics budget for current+future missions. The technical supplement document does have significantly reduced funds for NuSTAR, IXPE, TES (+HST, JWST, Roman), so I removed those Xs, but these are at/below bare minimum levels. 🔭
Astrophysics fleet with Xs over missions receiving no support in the FY26 president's proposed NASA budget, including many current and future facilities: Chandra, XMM-Newton, Swift, Fermi, NICER, Euclid, XRISM, COSI, Ultrsat, ARIEL, UVEX, LISA, and astrophysical probes.
May 31, 2025 at 4:23 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Have we as a society figured out definitively if there's supposed to be a space before the letter in an exoplanet name? "TRAPPIST-1 e" looks wrong but so does "WASP-96b"
May 24, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
nixonmatthew.bsky.social
Just shared a new paper on the arXiv, led my @luiswel.bsky.social and me, on the challenges associated with detecting gases in exoplanet atmospheres. As the field pushes towards new and exciting opportunities, we thought it was time to talk about what it really means to “detect” something!
May 2, 2025 at 1:29 AM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
chrislintott.bsky.social
A new, thorough reanalysis of the data that led to claims of biosignatures on K2-18b from @luiswel.bsky.social & friends - a nicely written lesson on why this stuff is hard. They find no significant evidence for DMS, the gas the Cambridge team claimed to have found. arxiv.org/abs/2504.21788
The Challenges of Detecting Gases in Exoplanet Atmospheres
Claims of detections of gases in exoplanet atmospheres often rely on comparisons between models including and excluding specific chemical species. However, the space of molecular combinations availabl...
arxiv.org
May 1, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
alexwitze.bsky.social
"Not strong evidence" - @spschmidt.bsky.social

"Almost certainly not life" - @tessafisher.bsky.social

In which I round up some Community Response on the exoplanet biosignature paper from last night 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Signs of life on a distant planet? Not so fast, say these astronomers
Bold claims of ‘biosignature’ molecules trigger an outpouring of scepticism.
www.nature.com
April 17, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
brettmorr.is
The atomic spectral lines in this app come from the NIST atomic spectroscopy group, which has provided the world with spectroscopic measurements for 120 years.

Today we got word that the federal government is laying off the entire group. 🔭🧪
brettmorr.is Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · Feb 24
Tired of wondering which atomic lines are in your spectra? You need:

*whose line is it anyway?* An interactive tool for identifying atomic spectral lines. 🧪🔭 #stars

install:
pip install whoseline

source:
github.com/bmorris3/who...
March 19, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
adiastra.bsky.social
new blog post! I talk about the potential risks to science posed by "vibes-based" LLM programming, and how we could mitigate them aditya-sengupta.github.io/vibescience/
The Impending Rise of Vibe Science
LLM-based programming is tempting for science because people mostly want to spend their time thinking about the problem they’re interested in, rather than writing code. This isn’t helped by the narrat...
aditya-sengupta.github.io
March 13, 2025 at 6:34 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Inbox of pain and agony #JWSTCycle4
March 11, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
mash-and-coffee.bsky.social
קפה #1281 Coffee

תראה @yoavrotman.bsky.social ! עשיתי לב לכבודך! אני מבטיח לשפר את כישורי ציור הלבבות שלי ב-25 השנים הבאות 😍
March 4, 2025 at 1:18 PM
yoavrotman.bsky.social
Paper editing is uh..... not going well
An overleaf comment box that shows two comments from me. The first says "I still hate this sentence." The second one is dated one minute later and says "I still haven't figured out how to make it better."
February 20, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
planetarysociety.bsky.social
The Planetary Society strongly opposes the sudden, indiscriminate dismissal of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and explorers at NASA — the largest involuntary workforce reduction since the end of the Apollo program.

Read more on our stance. ⬇️
The Planetary Society Strongly Opposes Mass Layoffs of Probationary…
Sudden, indiscriminate layoffs at NASA do not serve the national interests in space leadership.
www.planetary.org
February 18, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Yoav Rotman
planetarysociety.bsky.social
Sign our letter to urge Congress, President Donald Trump, and key officials to reverse this arbitrary decision. These letters have proven effective, helping us to save countless space missions, now lets save jobs. It takes less than 30 seconds to sign. Please share!
www.planetary.org/advocacy-act...
Advocacy Action Center
The Planetary Society is organizing a new space constituency that is educated, empowered, and loud.
www.planetary.org
February 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM