semaphoreP

Probably pretty difficult to find too many compelling cases. The bands starlink transmits in are designated communication bands, so interference from other satellites is going to be so high that it will drown out any signals. There are astronomers working on removing this foreground, but it's really difficult! It's actually becoming quite a problem in radio astronomy with the amount of the electromagnetic spectrum that is quiet enough for science.

Note that in these images, the planets are unresolved. They are point sources. Point sources span multiple pixels due to the sampling theorem.

Ah my bad, I mean that in the visible, you can't reach the diffraction limit with AO like you can in the near infrared. Certainly impressive matching HST from the ground.

I don't think past 5 microns there's been a lot of science done from the ground (not counting SOFIA). Practically, I think everyone is waiting for JWST. A lot of the interesting molecular lines also get absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere.

Adaptive optics is really only effective in the infrared. And really only in the near-infrared, as past 5 microns, we can't really see through the atmosphere. In the visible, ground-based can't match space observatories (in the visible, the atmospheric turbulence is way harder to correct for).

It's not the absolute value of the signal. What they're measuring the amount of water compared to hydrogen.

It's hard to measure absolute water abundances (it requires a lot of assumptions and extrapolating). This is a relative comparison of atmospheric water. We don't have relative water abundances for a lot of planets, so it's on the higher end, but we don't really know (maybe some other planets' water are hidden behind clouds).

It will be very tough with JWST. Many of the biosignatures are small features, and not so easily detected. There's only a handful of planets for which this might be close to possible.

Quite possibly I think. This is both confirmation that neutron star mergers do indeed exist and create kilonova, and the first detection of an astronomical event with both gravitational waves and light. Nobel prize is only limited to three people though, so it's unclear who they would give it to, given there are thousands of people that contributed to this.

Not involved in this, I'm guessing this is how it goes: there are algorithms that automatically register the image that was just taken, diff it with a reference image of the sky from before, and if there's a significant difference that passes some false positive tests, then there's some notification for human intervention.

Indeed there could be events we are missing right now. Astronomers are building instruments that have larger fields of view (e.g., LSST), so that they can scan the sky ever few days.

Actually this star is not in the Kepler Field, and it is also too bright for Kepler. Even most ground based telescopes looking for transits probably haven't bothered looking at it, due to its brightness.

Measuring the star wobble (i.e. doppler shift) doesn't give inclinations.