Drew Weisserman

@drewweisserman.bsky.social

790 Followers 597 Following

McMaster Astronomy PhD student. send me pictures of your pets or I will steal them. he/him 🏳️‍🌈 check out my research: https://drewweis.github.io/

Note that in the real arrangement of the system, Kepler-80f is the innermost planet. For simplicity, we adopt here a list in which the planets are labelled from closest to farthest.
The core mass fractions of my planets, both as inferred from the planet's mass/radius and from their host stars' abundances. You can see that on a population level, the planets have consistently smaller core mass fractions (read: are less dense) than their host stars would imply, though due to the uncertainties involved it's hard to make that claim about any one planet.
A plot showing the fit to a single spectral line (an iron line of HD 260655), and our model fitting to it the best it can. (Sadly, most spectral lines are NOT nearly this clean!)
A plot of the RVs of GJ 1132 (b on top, c on bottom) as a function of orbital phase. Look at how precise our measurements are!
A figure from Wanderley et al. (2025), showing that demographics of M dwarf exoplanets might be consistent with something called gas-poor formation (read: water-rich formation) rather than other formation theories. We want more evidence than this, though!
Half a loaf of bread
Histogram colored in matplotlib's default orange/blue/green/purple colors, at alpha = 0.8
Figure 5 from Weisserman & Gillis (2025). Left: A comparison of the various frequency terms featured in Eq. 5 obtained from the literature for early M dwarfs, FGK stars, and A stars. The terms fHJ, fCJ, fmult, and fmisaligned denote, respectively, the observed occurrence rates of hot Jupiters, cold Jupiters, the stellar multiplicity fractions, and the fraction of stellar binaries that are misaligned by ≥ 39◦ drawn from an isotropic distribution (i.e. 36.8%). The predicted frequency of HJs formed via KL migration is the distribution fHJ,pred = fCJSbinfmultfmisaligned (see Eq. 5). Right: cumulative distribution functions of the HJ formation efficiency by KL migration (fHJ/fHJ,pred) for each class of star considered herein.
Figure 4 from Weisserman & Gillis (2025). Results of orbital fits to Gaia DR3 astrometric data for the binary systems TOI-3714 (upper row) and TOI-5293 (lower row). Left column: a random selection of sky-projected binary orbit solutions from our astrometric fit posteriors. Right column: the distribution of minimum mutual inclinations between each system’s planet and binary companion. The vertical dashed line at arccos p 3/5 ≈ 39.2 ◦ corresponds to the minimum mutual inclination needed to drive KL migration. The percentiles of the mutual inclination distribution above and below 39.2 ◦ are depicted by different colors and are annotated for each system.
Figure 3 from Weisserman & Gillis (2025). The distribution of projected stellar obliquities |λ| for giant exoplanets (Rp ≥ 5 R⊕) as a function of host star effective temperature. All stellar obliquity measurements come from measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and are retrieved from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Hot Jupiters around M dwarfs (HJMDs) occupy the shaded red region of parameter space with Teff < 3900 K, while host stars above the Kraft break (Teff ≥ 6100 K) occupy the shaded blue region. The HJMDs TOI-3714 b and TOI-5293 A b from this work, and TOI-4201 (T. Gan et al. 2024) are highlighted by red arrows.
Figure 2 from Weisserman & Gillis (2025). The RM effect signatures for TOI-3714 b (left panel) and TOI-5293 A b (right panel). Each set of markers depicts the combined MAROON-X RV observations (i.e. blue plus red channels) for each transit sequence observed. The black curves represent random draws from our RM model posteriors after removing the median detrending model for each transit and the planet-induced Keplerian orbital signals.
Fig. 1 from Winn (2010), showing how the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect signals change as a function of the planet's obliquity.
Fig. 1 from Dawson & Johnson (2018), showing the methods of forming hot Jupiters.
"...sustained operations for high-performing missions in extended phases and provides not less than $27,200,000 million for Juno"
A crowd protesting, many carrying American/Canadian flags or signs
look how they massacred my boy
I’ve opened my eyes and listened to people who don’t think like me. And by doing so, I gained a greater understanding of and appreciation for LGBTQ issues, structural racism, the need for empathetic immigration reform, the dangers of climate change, and the role government must play to help care for the neediest and most vulnerable among us.
politiburb's profile, showing them at 999 followers
jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Dai Li agent (from Avatar: The Last Airbender) moving a lamp in circles, in a dark room
Sheen... this is the 7th week in a row you've shown Mike Waltz Security Breaches in class
32 hamantaschens on a baking sheet, with black, orange, and red filling
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
this post, immediately preceded by a post from @junlper.beer saying "a big sandwich might be life changing"
bush hearing about 9/11
Bush being informed about 9/11
A screenshot of the reactions to the quotes skeet, showing 259 responses and 2 likes
Impact corridor of 2024 YR4, showing a red great circle sector from Bogota to Lagos to Dhaka. Source: ParadoxicalCabbage on Reddit
kylo ren yelling 'MOOORE'
news article titled "Darius Slay Was 'This Close' To Becoming a Raven"
A screenshot of vizier.astro.unistra.fr, showing the website as it normally looks
Kylo Ren yelling "MOOOOORE"
The skyline of Grenoble, slightly hazy. Faded mountains can be seen in the background.
A picture of a telescope bathed in red light, inside a dome. The sunset can be seen outside, with the sky fading from red to blue.
A man in a black shirt with an “I Voted” sticker
Rubber-banded stack of blue postcards on a table, with “Michigan Votes Tuesday, November 5th” on top
Reactions Battle of Wits. When the dragon is targeted with a ranged attack by a creature it can see, it can throw a creature grappled by it up to 20 feet into the attack's path. The attacker must succeed on a contested Intelligence (Insight) check against the dragon or have its attack instead target the thrown creature.
Jack, 22, N.Y., white, underwriter, voted Biden in 2020 "I'm leaning towards writing in Mike Bloomberg."
"We've traced the [homo]phobes... they're coming from inside the house, and the senate"
From NYT: "Even if leaders can strike a deal, the Senate could be in session for the long haul on Sunday. Though the planned procedural vote was scheduled to take place around 1 p.m., aides were making plans over the weekend to ensure senators would be able to watch the Super Bowl, carting extra televisions into the Capitol and ordering pizza, in case they were called to vote on a sudden deluge of amendments."