Mikko Tuomi

The White House announced a plan to cancel over 50 #space missions as part of a devastating 46% cut to #NASA #science.

The proposal would likely eliminate thousands of jobs at an agency that has just launched astronauts to the #Moon for the first time in decades, and dozens of other space missions would see their operations reduced or slowly wound down to a halt.

The following missions are to be cancelled:

1. The Habitable Worlds Observatory being built to search for #life on dozens of Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System while addressing fundamental questions about our #Universe.

2. OSIRIS-APEX capitalizes on the exceptionally rare 2029 Earth flyby of the potentially hazardous #asteroid #Apophis to advance planetary defense strategies and reveal how Earth’s #gravity alters an asteroid’s surface and interior.

3. The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will deliberately search for signs of life on #Mars by analyzing the composition of samples collected from as deep as 2 meters below the surface.

4. The DAVINCI mission is an atmospheric probe that will be deployed to our sister planet, #Venus, and provide the first detailed measurements of the composition and chemistry of its #atmosphere.

5. Initially focusing on #Jupiter’s interior, atmosphere, and aurora, #Juno is already orbiting Jupiter and has expanded during its extended mission to be a full system explorer capable of investigating the Galilean satellites, rings, inner moons, radiation belts, and boundaries of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

6. VERITAS will create unprecedented, global, high-resolution datasets of Venus designed to answer a fundamental question for rocky #planets: how did Earth and her twin Venus evolve into two entirely different examples of planetary #habitability?

https://www.planetary.org/articles/meet-the-people-behind-nasas-endangered-missions

A new image of #Mars from #Psyche mission flyby.

#planets #astrophotography

Grants managers at two of the US government’s largest funders of scientific research have placed unprecedented limitations on the ability of US scientists to publish with co-authors from other countries.

Units of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.

NASA, meanwhile, is reportedly telling some grantees that papers co-authored with researchers in China may have violated its rules.

Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned.

In several cases, NIH grantees say they have been asked to remove published papers with foreign co-authors from annual progress reports to the agency.

Observers say the policy creates an incentive to preemptively remove foreign co-authors from forthcoming papers.

#science
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-researchers-face-new-restrictions-publishing-foreign-collaborators?utm_source=sfmc

Olisi kirja tulossa luettavaksi syksyllä ja tältä se nyt sitten taitaa näyttää.

"Eksoplaneetat ovat muita tähtiä kiertäviä planeettoja. Eksoplaneettojen tutkija Mikko Tuomi kertoo näiden uusien maailmojen tutkimuksesta ja erityisesti elämän merkkien etsimisestä niiltä."

This picture from the #JWST features an astounding number of #galaxies.

The objects in this frame span an incredible range of distances, from stars within our own Milky Way, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies billions of light-years away.

#astronomy #astrophotography
https://esawebb.org/images/potm2504a/

See the narrow gap in the plotted temperature-luminosity diagram corresponding to the stellar properties of our nearest #stars?

It is a narrow region where stars are not allowed, because there is a transition between stars with thin radiative outer layers and those that are fully convective.

It was a surprise to be able to obtain such subtle astrophysical information by simply looking at a sample of stars with accurately characterised properties.

#astronomy #astrophysics
https://aasnova.org/2018/07/11/3796/

#ALMA has been in scientific operations for almost 15 years.

As of the beginning of February 2026, ALMA had observed 3933 independent coordinates.

Here is a collection of ALMAs observations of circumstellar #disks with substructures in dust continuum emission, available in the literature.

Each panel is 400 au in size, and the disks are scaled based on the #Gaia DR3 parallax, ranging from largest to smallest continuum disk from top to bottom.

#astronomy
https://astrobiology.com/2026/06/an-archival-summary-15-years-of-alma-observations-on-disks-and-planet-formation.html

Paper by Kurtovic et al. (2026):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30023

Elokuussa tulee täyteen 20 vuotta akateemisena pätkätyöläisenä.

Olen ollut töissä neljässä maassa ja kolmella mantereella määräaikaisena työntekijänä, vierailevana tutkijana, apurahatutkijana, ja ties missä roolissa.

Eikä henkihieveriin leikattu akatemia voi tarjota parempaa.

https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/maaraaikaisen-tutkijan-helvetti/

Desert worlds outside our solar system are unlikely to host #life.

This is because an Earth-sized #planet needs at least 20 to 50% of the #water in #Earth's #oceans to maintain a critical natural cycle that keeps water on the surface.

Planetary #habitability hinges on the geologic #carbon cycle—a water-driven process that exchanges carbon between the #atmosphere and interior over millions of years, stabilizing surface temperatures.

Carbon dioxide, which comes from #volcanoes in a natural system, accumulates in the atmosphere before falling back to Earth dissolved in rainwater.

Rain erodes and chemically reacts with rocks on Earth's surface and runoff transports carbon to the ocean, where it sinks to the seafloor.

Plate tectonics drives carbon-rich oceanic plates below continental land and millions of years later, carbon resurfaces as mountains form.

However, if water levels drop too low for rainfall, carbon removal—from weathering—can't keep up with emissions from volcanic eruptions and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere spike, trapping water.

Rising temperatures evaporate the remaining surface water, initiating runaway warming that makes the planet too hot to support life.

That unfortunately makes arid planets, with little water and rainfall, within habitable zones unlikely to be good candidates for life.

#astronomy #astrobiology #exoplanets
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-planets-life-scientists-previously-thought.html

Paper by White-Gianella et al. (2026):
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ae4faa

Tämä on eksoplaneettojen vuosi!

Helsingin yliopiston eksoplaneettatutkimuksemme on saanut merkittävää rahoitusta ja ryhmäämme saapuu opinnäytetöitään tekemään jatkuvasti uusia opiskelijoita.

Julkaisen myös pian uuden kirjan: Löytöretki eksoplaneetoille.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/06/22/eksoplaneettojen-vuosi/

Kirjoitin vasta hiljattain siitä, kuinka Maa sai alkunsa, mutta uudet tulokset tarjoavat jatkuvasti yksityiskohtaisempaa tietoa planeettakuntamme synnystä.

Maa syntyi, koska ei voinut muuta ja siksi niin käy taatusti muissakin samankaltaisissa planeettakunnissa.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/05/20/uusi-malli-maan-synnylle/

Tunnemme jo tuhansia eksoplaneettoja ja olemme oppineet arvioimaan, ainakin karkealla tavalla, niin elinkelpoisuutta.

Mitkä ovat parhaita paikkoja ylläpitämään elämää kuten oma planeettamme?

Uudet tutkimukset valaiseva asiaa taas hitusen verran lisää.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/luettelo-parhaista-maailmoista-elamalle/

The earliest known #eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex #life on Earth, lived in oxygenated, shallow marine environments nearly 1.7 billion years ago.

The earliest eukaryotes for which we have #fossils lived in predominantly near-shore, oxygenated, benthic (on the seafloor) settings.

This implies that the availability of #oxygen was dictating eukaryote #evolution from its early stages.

#biology #astrobiology
https://astrobiology.com/2026/05/early-complex-life-lived-in-oxygenated-seas-challenging-long-held-views-of-evolution.html

Paper by Lechte et al. (2026):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10533-4

When a scientific controversy or breakthrough dominates headlines, press officers and journalists often quote a handful of experts.

These views may be insightful, but they rarely tell us what the wider scientific community thinks.

And yet public discussions frequently rely on phrases such as “the science says” or “scientists believe”, as if there were a clear and measurable answer.

In reality, systematic evidence about scientific opinion is often missing.

Attempts to find evidence for #life beyond Earth provide fascinating case studies into diversity of scientific opinion.

#science #astrobiology
https://theconversation.com/could-it-be-aliens-from-cheyava-falls-on-mars-to-exoplanet-k2-18b-heres-what-scientists-really-think-284393

If you’ve ever witnessed a #whale’s powerful exhalation at the surface, you’ve likely experienced the notorious “whale breath”, that pungent cloud that can clear a whale-watching boat deck in seconds.

But while humans can certainly detect these oceanic odors, the question remains: Can whales themselves smell?

The answer is more complex than you might expect, with significant differences between toothed whales (#odontocetes) and baleen whales (#mysticetes).

#biology #ecology #evolution
https://whalescientists.com/can-whales-smell/

Climate models show considerable discrepancies in their future projections around the Atlantic, mainly due to uncertainties in the fate of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (#AMOC).

#Climate models have previously suggested a reduction in AMOC strength of 32±37% by 2100.

But a closer examination, however, gives an estimate of the AMOC slowdown of 51±8%.

This refinement mainly results from correcting a bias in South Atlantic surface #salinity, consistent with recent studies emphasizing its role in the proximity to an AMOC tipping point.

This more substantial AMOC weakening has key implications for future #adaptation strategies.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298

The cosmic shoreline concept was introduced to separate #planets with #atmospheres from those without, by relating the cumulative X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) instellation to the planetary escape velocity, using the Solar System planets to anchor the empirical relation.

The #exoplanet community has since attempted to refine the cosmic shoreline to provide a consistent ranking or prioritisation tool for exoplanet observations – i.e., to quickly identify which small #planets are most likely to have retained an #atmosphere.

In a new paper, astronomers use an empirical approach to refine the cosmic shoreline concept.

The Empirical Exoplanet Cosmic Shoreline (EECS) exhibits a significantly steeper slope than previously theorized, while consistently categorising Solar System moons and dwarf planets according to their atmospheric properties.

Applied to planets orbiting M dwarfs, the EECS suggests that a larger fraction retain atmospheres than predicted by classical models, but incorporating revised XUV fluence histories for low-mass M dwarfs reveals severe atmospheric vulnerability.

#astronomy #astrobiology
https://astrobiology.com/2026/06/an-empirical-determination-of-the-cosmic-shoreline-2.html

Paper by Meni-Gallardo & Pallé (2026):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12865

Sand clouds form every morning but clear up by nightfall on WASP-94A b, a well-studied gas giant located nearly 700 light years away from Earth.

New research using data from the #JWST is among the first to detect #cloud cycles on a Hot #Jupiter #exoplanet.

By isolating the clouds, researchers were able to more accurately measure the properties of the #planet's #atmosphere and provide one of the clearest pictures to date of the planet's composition.

Observations revealed that mornings and evenings on WASP-94A b have extremely different weather patterns: Mornings are riddled with clouds made of magnesium silicate, a common mineral found in rocks, while the evening has clear skies.

Hot Jupiter planets orbit much closer to their stars—closer even than Mercury to the sun—and therefore are much hotter and are exposed to more radiation. Because of their extreme environments, these planets also make good laboratories to study the chemistry and physics of cloud dynamics.

#astronomy #exoplanets
https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/05/21/astronomy-exoplanet-atmospheres-detecting-clouds/

Paper by Mukherjee et al. (2026):
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5903

Global sea levels may rise faster than previously expected.

The reason is that warming oceans appear to be melting #Antarctic ice shelves from below much more rapidly than expected.

Ice shelves, which are extensions of gigantic #glaciers that float on the water surface, act like buttresses that slow the flow of gigatons of ice into the sea.

Now, researchers have discovered that long, channel-like grooves on the underside of these ice shelves can trap relatively warm ocean water, sharply increasing local melting.

f Antarctic ice shelves thin and weaken, the downhill journey of the ice behind them can accelerate, fast-forwarding the process in which huge amounts of ice cascade into the ocean, causing sea levels worldwide to rise far faster than currently projected.

#climate
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-rapidly-antarctic-ice-shelves-global.html

Paper by Zhou et al. (2026):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71828-8

Global #temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events.

In a new paper, exploiting natural global temperature variability, researchers find that 1ºC warming reduces world #GDP by over 20% in the long run.

This implicates that the #macroeconomic damages from #climate change are an order of magnitude larger than previously thought.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/141/2/889/8490467?login=false

Happivallankumous muutti Maan biosfäärin energiseksi, monisoluisten organismien maailmaksi.

Mutta toisilla planeetoilla elämä voi kukoistaa mainiosti vailla happea.

Hapen yleisyys elävien planeettojen kaasukehissä on toistaiseksi täysin tuntematonta.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/06/05/happi-kompleksisen-elaman-taustalla/

Tähtitieteilijät ovat ensi kertaa kyenneet tekemään yksityiskohtaisia havaintoja eksoplaneetan sääilmiöistä.

Kuuman jättiläisplaneetan WASP-94A b tuulisella aamutaivaalla muodostuu magnesiumsilikaattipilviä, kun taas iltataivas on selkeä.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/06/10/aamu-usvaa-eksoplaneetoilla/

Kopernikaaninen periaate tarkoittaa sitä, että emme ole maailmankaikkeudessa minkäänlaisessa erityisasemassa.

Myöskään planeettakuntamme synty ei ollut epätodennäköinen sattumus, vaan vain vääjäämätön kehityskulku nuoren tähden kiertoradalla.
https://tuomim.wordpress.com/2026/05/20/uusi-malli-maan-synnylle/