Prof. Sam Lawler

Tomorrow is my talk for the astronomy portion of the Physics & Astronomy Department at UBC, but it's open to the public, if you're in Vancouver tomorrow (Monday) at 4pm "The Kuiper Belt vs. the Billionaire Space Race"

The Kuiper Belt vs. the Billionaire Space Race

Now I guess I better finish putting together that talk (which mostly involved culling slides) before I go to bed... #ProfSamLectureTour

Time to watch @Deb Chachra give a talk at UBC in the forestry department! Because I'm just leaning in to the theme of interdisciplinarity as much as I possibly can to end this week. #ProfSamLectureTour

An astronomer in a meeting this morning referred to SpaceX as "a pet crocodile" and I think this metaphor is delightful, especially with absolutely no additional context.

I could really use a good cat snuggle, but my cats are 1,000 km away (with a kind farm sitter, but still... I need a cat snuggle. And a goat snuggle. And a dog snuggle. And a llama snuggle...) #ProfSamLectureTour

First media interview of the day done, plus I got a little bit of writing done on the train/bus this morning. Yesterday ended up being political science day, today is chemistry: I get to talk to an atmospheric chemist about how much satellite reentries are changing the upper atmosphere. I hope I will have time for a walk outside sometime today, because I will absolutely need it after chatting with the chemist... #ProfSamLectureTour

After a whole day of hanging around and listening to political science academics talk about a wide variety of distressing current events, talking about anti-satellite weapons tests, having meetings about sunlight-as-a-service and other stupid satellite ideas, and many hours on transit, I desperately need to go rage-scream in a hay field, but I'm in a big city ☹️

Somehow I just ended up giving a (completely unplanned) short lecture in an undergrad international law class at UBC about space debris in Saskatchewan! #ProfSamLectureTour

Did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation with a collaborator for AST SpaceMobile's fucking huge satellite launched last month and will unfurl soon. We got mag -12. The full moon is -13, magnitudes are logarithmic. It's a little fainter than the moon, at least? We made lots of assumptions, so this number is quite uncertain, but it's pretty clear that no matter what, it'll be eye-blazingly-bright. And they want 400 of them. I hate AST SpaceMobile almost as much as I hate Reflect Orbital.

EVERYONE!! Fomalhaut is at it again!! Crashing its planetesimals together and making dust clouds!!!! I am very excited because I and others wrote papers saying that this would happen: if Fomalhaut b (the first directly imaged "exoplanet" oops) was actually a dust cloud, it should fade away and another one should appear on ~decade timescales. I love being right about science predictions that don't involve destroying the night sky or atmosphere or Kessler Syndrome! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15861