iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a post about (my begrudgingly beloved) Angels with news that wasn’t incredibly depressing, and I’m still immediately wary

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Fun story. There's an episode of the Big Bang Theory where the astronomer character is using a Hawaiian telescope remotely from California. The usage of that idea in the episode was inspired by a visit the show writers made to visit *me* in 2009, where I showed them the UCLA/Keck remote room.

youtube.com

Howard and Raj Kiss | The Big Bang Theory

YouTube video by The Big Bang Theory

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

my wife, trying to remember the order of operations: “Parentheses. Exponents. Umm. Math? Decimals. Algorithms… (long, thoughtful pause) Sandwiches”

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

happy Chicago's song Saturday In the Park day to everyone who celebrates

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Just a reminder that Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is very good, a strange miracle of a film that somehow slipped through the weird limitations of Hollywood moviemaking

A shot from the film Master and Commander where Lord Blakeney has drawn some seals and written “argh!” to indicate the noise they make, it’s very charming

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

just got that rare privilege of being the person on the flight where the attendant playfully dropped the fake oxygen mask right in front of my face during their demo

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

the way that astronomers name things is wild, and almost completely dependent on the type of source, the subfield the source belongs to, the importance of the object, and, weirdly, the confidence of the person who made the discovery? Global Democratic Vote would at least produce similar nonsense

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

every year I see people getting excited about MLB Opening Day, which for us fans of the Angels is just the day we get to turn on the Torment Nexus again

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

there’s a post I just saw where someone is dismissive of astronomy because there’s other sciences that directly deal with human life and the environment, and…what are we made of? Atoms, many born in the centers of stars, thrown through the Universe through supernovae, and we can see this happening!

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

my parents are watching the olympics and there's a spanish ice dancer dressed in an arrakis stillsuit for some reason first: it doesn't look like his boots were properly fit slip fashion second: it seems kind of insulting to the proud fremen to freeze precious water just for dancing

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

My contribution to the JADES DR5 release was a paper showing off the TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTY ONE farthest galaxies and candidates in the survey, a treasure trove of cosmic dawn objects that help us understand how the first galaxies came to be. The paper: arxiv.org/abs/2601.15959

A plot showing UV absolute magnitude (or intrinsic brightness of the galaxy) vs. the redshift, with an enormous number of tiny points, blue ones are in GOODS-S, red ones are in GOODS-N, and a small number have black outlines since they've been confirmed spectroscopically. The galaxies are from when the Universe was 200 - 700 million years old, as shown along the top axis.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

You can go and look at the data yourself using our interactive FitsMap viewer, which allows you to see the galaxies, their properties, and what they look like at a variety of wavelengths, including Hubble, JWST/NIRCam, JWST/MIRI, and even in the X-ray with Chandra!

jades-survey.github.io

Interactive Viewer

The JADES Collaboration has created an immersive, interactive website for you to experience these remarkable JWST images, catalogs, and spectra, for two regions of the sky: GOODS-South and GOODS-North...

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Yesterday, the JADES team released our "Data Release 5," an enormous, many-year effort by quite a number of folks combining the 800+ hour JADES data with dozens of public datasets in and around the Hubble Deep and Ultra-Deep fields. It's so exciting! jades-survey.github.io/high-redshif...

a large image of the JWST / JADES DR5 GOODS-S region of the sky, patchy around the edges, but continuous in the middle, with zoom in regions showing dozens of galaxies.

another large image of the JWST / JADES DR5 GOODS-N region of the sky, patchy around the edges, but continuous in the middle, with zoom in regions showing dozens of galaxies.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

The University of Arizona Basketball team is doing an astronomy night ("Galaxy Slam") and they put out a trailer with astronomers from Steward and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, including NIRCam PI Marcia Rieke, and I love it, it's *so* endearingly dorky.

youtube.com

Galaxy Slam

YouTube video by The University of Arizona

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Oh, for all of my astronomy bluesky friends, if you want to say hi, or get lunch or dinner at the Phoenix AAS next week, let me know! I have a few brown dwarf talks on Tuesday, and I'll be there Tuesday through Thursday. I'm excited to head back to my first winter meeting in...over a decade?

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I went to a concert in LA at the Troubadour in 2009 and people kept turning to look at me, only after a few songs did I myself turn, confused, to see that they were actually looking at Ryan Gosling who was standing immediately behind me

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

this weekend I performed a piece in the Tucson Puppet Cabaret, my second overhead projector shadow puppet show, where The Universe chatted with the audience about our weird history of trying to talk to aliens. It's so much fun finding new and weird avenues of science communication!

a person (myself) sitting at a table in front of an overhead project, on which he's manipulating the mouth of a projected face overlaid on top of the Milky Way galaxy, which is behind him, on the wall, smiling.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

There is no chance. There are no parts.

Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love

June Jordan
1936 –2002

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I want to fit this cocoa price chart and determine the effective temperature of this obvious Y dwarf, I might see phosphine absorption halfway through 2024

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

My most common questions from the public: - has JWST discovered aliens / why haven’t we discovered aliens - what happened before the Big Bang - what’s inside a black hole (also TikToks they saw about the earth being flat/the moon landing being fake, or sensationalized media attention to articles)

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

My talk is today at 1 PM Pacific, and if you're interested, you can watch live online, too, you just have to register at the link!

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

there’s this weird edit of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck where they edit out every other beat and I’ve used it in softball and it sounds insane and I would love to hear a crowd try to sing along to Brian Johnson’s unintelligible half syllables

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

I spent my evening doing a deep research dive into Star Trek, because I'm giving a talk on Tuesday here in Tucson about the cultural impact of the series. These shows, and these stories, are so important to me as they helped me understand our responsibility to each other, and to our curiosity.

foxtucson.com

Curious Conversation - Star Trek

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

talking at carnegie today with an astronomer about infrared selection of AGNs and she said "ah, so, [the technique] is reliable but not complete" and I think I want that as a t-shirt RELIABLE BUT NOT COMPLETE

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Oh also I owe a lot to the help of my co-authors @bemiles.bsky.social, @markmarley.bsky.social and @jarron.bsky.social because I’m ostensibly an extragalactic scientist. It’s so great to meet people who know a lot more than you do about anything (it’s a great reason for universities to exist)

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Ok, so, I should correct myself: Tucson doesn't get to 120, but Phoenix has gotten up there. So imagine an object the size of Jupiter with an atmosphere the temperature of Arizona desert in the height of summer; *in JADES we could see this object even if it was 4000-5000 light years away.*

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Today is my birthday, *and* it's a Pythagorean triple, 9 / 16 / 25. This sort of thing really got a lot of Greek mathematicians excited, until they had to reckon with what would happen to the length (c) if (a) and (b) were 1, that awful irrational square root of two.

a blue triangle with sides labelled a, b, and then the hypotenuse is c. There are squares along each side that show how a^2 is 9, b^2 is 16, and c^2 is the sum of 9 and 16, 25. In the top it says a^2 + b^2 = c^2.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

I own a pair of these deep field socks, and they're what I've worn to so many public JWST talks and they always get a great reaction from folks who notice. I might have to pick up a second pair, not because mine have worn out, but just because I love them so much.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

@jparish.bsky.social A number of years ago I stumbled on the story behind A Link to the Past's Chris Houlihan Room, including the letter sent to Chris from Nintendo Power. I finally decided to make a video about it all, in case you're interested. youtu.be/SY00ri_a9y4?...

youtu.be

Chris Houlihan Is Real

YouTube video by Kevin Hainline

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Last night, the Steward Observatory summer softball team (The "StrOHs") won the league championship game, 12-2. I've been playing summer softball through some good and a *lot* of bad years. It felt pretty damn great to win last night, capping a fun season. This was the StrOH's *first* championship!

A softball team posing with a big trophy on a large field. They're smiling, and in the background is a scoreboard showing the visitors with 2 runs, and the home team with 12 runs.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

A few months ago Flandrau Planetarium asked if I wanted to do a show, so I said yes and then my wife and I wrote something and performed it tonight, some of it was me talking about astronomy and some of it was her playing music and it was good. Sometimes you get through this all by loving.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

hey I really recommend getting to know your nice retired neighbor and inviting him over for dinner and cooking a pretty good shrimp creole and just talking with him about his recent trip to Chicago to see the Cubs at Wrigley for the first time in his life It’s a great way to spend an evening

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

The poet Andrea Gibson passed away. They were an incredible writer, live performer, and their work had a huge impact on people around the world. I do a lot of these astronomy shows, and often I think about how I can soften the science, how I can make it something more like what I saw from Andrea.

the poet Andrea Gibson on stage, standing in front of a microphone, performing. The backdrop looks like it has stars, and there are glowing orbs on the ground. Andrea wears a vest, and looks triumphant.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

My grad student Jake Helton defended his PhD successfully today. I'm so excited for him to head on to Penn State for a postdoctoral appointment in the fall. At UofA, grad students are awarded crowns and capes for their PhD, and here's the elaborate History of the Universe cape I painted for him.

a colorful painting illustrating the history of the Universe, with the Big Bang at the top, and time moving down towards the bottom, where the words JAKE HELTON, PHD are painted. The center shows a graphical representation of his history, with changing colors and galaxies emerging from the cosmic fog. On the right are labels of the major events, The Big Bang, The Universe Cools, Recombination, The Dark Ages, Cosmic Dawn, Reinoization, The Fog Clears, and then we are left with A Universe of Galaxies. Humanity is indicated with an arrow pointing downward. On the left are painted representations of Jake's PhD work, with paintings of JADES-GS-z14-0, a spectroscopically confirmed galaxy at z > 14, which Jake helped identify as a source detected with MIRI. There are also paintings of his overdensities, and his work exploring how MIRI effects derived galaxy properties.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

THIS EVENING, I'm talking about those mysterious "Little Red Dot" galaxies seen with JWST in a public "Deep Space Dialogue" facilitated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Little Red Dots are super weird! 4:00 PM Pacific / 7:00 PM Eastern, live on Youtube! www.stsci.edu/contents/eve...

stsci.edu

JWST’s Tiny Red Sources and the Big Questions They Raise

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

I was asked to give the keynote for the Arizona Science Teachers Association last night, and I spoke about the origin of the elements and what JWST can tell us about how atoms are put together. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHih... (...but also I talked about science education in this country!)

youtube.com

The Entire Universe is Made of Small Particles with Dr. Kevin Hainline

YouTube video by Arizona Science Teachers Association

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

This is a screen grab from yesterday’s University of Arizona College of Science Commencement, where I hooded my graduate student Jake Helton. I’m very proud and I urged the crowd to get louder because getting a PhD is intensely difficult and I wanted him to hear the ~10k people cheering for him

A stage where multiple scientists and university professors stand wearing wizard regalia, in the center is my graduate student getting his PhD hood, I’m behind him holding my hand to my ear in a classic “I can’t hear you” maneuver to the large crowd. I have a very goofy face, because I know this isn’t necessarily “professional,” but rather “fun.”

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

People often ask if JWST has "replaced" Hubble, and I like to say they're siblings, working together to give us unique views of the Universe. My friend and former grad school compatriot Kathy Kornei wrote a great article about HST on it's 35th anniversary. www.sciencenews.org/article/hubb...

sciencenews.org

See how the Hubble Space Telescope is still revolutionizing astronomy

Hubble is still going strong 35 years after it was launched into space. Celebrate its anniversary with some out-of-this-world images.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

I *love* Jurassic Park. I know that there are a lot more important things going on, but I just posted a 45 minute deep dive into the paleontology, biology, and math that inspired the book and the movie, in honor of @blankcheck.bsky.social's upcoming Jurassic Park episode. youtu.be/XpnbqcZg7VE?...

youtu.be

The Pre-History of Jurassic Park

YouTube video by Kevin Hainline

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

So, I've spent the last few months doing a deep dive into Jurassic Park because, well, Blank Check (@blankcheck.bsky.social) is about to cover the film. I'm making a series of videos/essays about the film for next week, here's a little sneak peek from my video on the "Pre-History of Jurassic Park."

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

When I'm interviewed about the power of JWST, I always worry I'm perhaps being too hyperbolic or enthusiastic about what we've learned (and what we have yet to learn!) from this powerful telescope. This video shows off that I'm not alone! I love hearing so many familiar voices gushing about JWST.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

So, remember when I posted about this amazing galaxy? Well, the paper has been accepted in Nature, and there's a wonderful write-up out today, with this very cool visualization showing the galaxy sneakily sitting between two big, more nearby sources: webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

webbtelescope.org

NASA's Webb Sees Galaxy Mysteriously Clearing Fog of Early Universe

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Bill is one of the pioneers of exploring these enormous oxygen regions kicked up and lit by supermassive black hole accretion! It’s fun to surprise astronomers with weird new things in our weird diverse Universe.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Oh, and ESA just made a really cool video that shows you just how much you'd have to zoom in to find JADES-GS-z14-0 on the sky. It's amazing to think about just how many other galaxies we haven't seen yet but we know are out there. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QjS...

youtube.com

Zooming in on JADES-GS-z14-0, the most distant galaxy known yet

YouTube video by European Southern Observatory (ESO)

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Last year, we stumbled on this *remarkable* galaxy at the edge of some JADES data. The green emission in the central panel is enormous (82 THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS ACROSS) plumes of oxygen gas extending to either side of this relatively normal galaxy, seen one billion years after the Big Bang.

three panels from a paper showing a galaxy, in the left panel by itself, in the middle panel surrounded by hazy ghosts of oxygen gas, and in the right panel, similar but fainter extensions of hydrogen gas.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

after raining all night, the clouds rolled away just in time to give me a nice look at the ol' moon here, as she slips into our shadow.

the moon, looking reddish, from light through the Earth's dusty atmosphere, as it slips into the shadow of the Earth. There are a few stars off above and to the right. It's something very special, our Moon.

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Kevin Hainline @kevinhainline.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

my wife is on tour, and it was really nice a week and a half ago to come into the office and listen to her on the radio in Nashville. Her tour ends this week and I'm not going to lie, I'm excited to have her home. youtu.be/ItJaZGQ_7FE

youtu.be

Lara Ruggles performs “Love Me Instead” and “Bend the Truth” - Live at Lightning 100

YouTube video by Lightning 100

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