Last night @CapricePhillips gave a moving introductory speech to the film “hidden figures”. It was shown at the @UnitedPalaceNYC theatre as part of their summer series. Caprice reflected on her journey through science and celebrated all things #blackinastro. Follow her for more!

Last night was a gorgeous sunset in #nyc . We are close to the summer solstice (six days out) so we are in the high part of #manhattanhenge effect season. At 8:08 last night the sun crossed the city grid about 2.5 degrees above the horizon. Lighting up the canyon brilliantly.

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An excellent write up of the annual summer event of Astronomy in your face!!! #manhattanhenge season arrives today May 28th. Get your cameras ready.

Today is the official start of #manhattanhenge season! Get your cameras ready as the day is looking gorgeous. The sun will set far enough north today that it just kisses the grid of the city before setting. It lights up the concrete jungle in perfect golden hour colors. @AMNH

RT @RCSA1: Congratulations to our #RCSAFellows, and many thanks to the Facilitators, advisory committee members, panelists, host institutio….

There was a great team contributing to this including those on twitter: @substellarfella @jgagneastro @johannamvos @AstroShair @AstroCaroline @rociokiman @dancaselden @marckuchner @astro_daniella @exoEhsan @EGonzales788 @AstroA19 @n_whiteford @JWSTObservation @AMNH @GC_CUNY.

In all, it's SUPER exciting to see such an unexpected result. And now we get to follow this thing up and search for more details about this phenomenon. It's an EXCELLENT comparative object for solar system objects, exoplanets and other brown dwarfs. So it wins on all fronts.

Jupiter gets an auroral contribution from Io, it's volcanic moon. Could this thing have something orbiting it and supplying the plasma that leads to the aurora that leads to the methane emission? Way too soon to tell but certainly an enticing possibility!

We went with an auroral explanation for the phenomenon. But we still have to find the ingredients that make that aurora happen. There's no star that this thing is orbiting so the solar wind isn't contributing to that inversion. Could it be an internal process? Maybe. Or maybe. .

Our object was COLD though (~480K or the temperature you bake cookies at), making it extra enticing and interesting. It's much more like Jupiter than it is like any star. And Jupiter certainly has beautiful aurora AND shows methane in emission.

The aurora was an easy go to explanation for what was going on. Several brown dwarfs have been suggested as being auroral candidates. Recently Melodie Kao led a paper that showed resolved imaging of a radiation belt around one such candidate:

We don't have answers to everything but we can speculate a bit.

Then the speculation began: what would cause a temperature inversion? Why just the methane? Was this an internal or an external process? How does this compare to other objects? Why was this the only object showing it? Sooooo many questions. .

If we tried to force the model to behave like what one would expect for an isolated source (aka NO INVERSION ALLOWED) then it looked ok but it could not fit the methane emission. That meant the temperature inversion was explaining it!!!

In order to fit the methane emission feature we required a TEMPERATURE INVERSION!!! Wow. It was 300K and centered at 1-10mbar. That means instead of getting warmer in a fairly uniform way as you dive into the object, you would hit this hot spot in the upper atmosphere.

To really figure it out we then went about the modeling exercise. @substellarfella has a retrieval code called Brewster that was up for the task! We added all the appropriate gases and physics, ran the models and saw something amazing as a result. .

The feature is centered on the famous q-branch of methane, exactly where all the other sources show a nice drop in flux as methane usually is absorbing light. But in our case the methane was GLOWING!

H3+ seemed so enticing but we just weren't sure so I wrote @LeighFletcher for some advice as I knew he was working on the Jupiter spectrum with JWST and he sent me down the CH4 fluorescence route! Then we were cooking with gas.

At first the feature was a mystery for the observers and modelers alike. I would bring it up regularly with everyone but since the object was so cold, we didn't think of what now seems like such an obvious answer. And then @AstroCaroline sent me a message with a possible answer

Right away, two objects (called W2220 and W1935) stuck out because they were near clones of each other except for one VERY VERY suspicious feature right around 3.3 microns. W1935 had a BUMP where no other object -- even it's clone W2220 -- had something.