This year's April Fool's Day science papers are coming online.
First, from our favorite astrophysicist @sundogplanets
1. Cow-culation: Reentry Impact Risk to Livestock in the Satellite Megaconstellation Era
... is launching more satellites into LEO every year.
This could intersect with NZ’s famously large population of livestock. We predict this will be an udder disaster for any cows that are hit, as they are squishy and moo-ve much more slowly than space debris.
April 1 paper 2.
2. Do Papers with Titles Ending in a Question Mark Usually Have the Answer “No”?
With almost clock-like precision, astronomers post approx one paper per day to the arXiv with a title ending in a question mark.
This begs several questions:
Why do they do this? What’s the purpose? What hidden parameters drive the variations in the frequency?
🤔
April 1 paper 3.
3. No hair but plenty of feathers: are birds black holes?
The imitative verb “chirp” is thought to originate from 16th-century Middle English. Meanwhile, this same word has been used to describe the gravitational waves emitted from the merger of compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars. Motivated purely by this linguistic overlap, we study whether the chirps of birds can be modeled by compact binary waveforms.
April 1 paper 4.
4. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
None of these works have addressed the obvious question: could meatballs condense in, and then rain out of, exoplanet atmospheres?
We seek to right this catastrophic failure of the exoplanet field by running detailed microphysical models to understand the planetary conditions which give rise to meatball precipitation, as well as characterizing what that precipitation might look like.
🌨️ 😋
4/n
April 1 paper 5.
5. Non-Equilibrium Sock Dynamics: Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in the Agitated Wash
On the basis of these findings, we offer the following practical recommendations for extending sock lifetime:
use synthetic socks with a nondispersive spectrum,
wash at low temperatures to suppress the Landau–Khalatnikov channel, and
select a low spin speed to remain below the Casimir resonance.
🧦 🤣
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29650
5/n
Additional creative April 1 papers can be found -
- in the replies section below
- at https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/recent?skip=0&show=50
- and at https://www.actaprimaaprilia.com/2026-issue
6/n
AkaSci 🛰️
Benno 
Open Water Otter VE7GR🏳️🌈
Rich Stein (he/him)
M.S. Bellows, Jr.