Dr. James Beattie

@natastron.nature.com’s cover looks amazing this month! Read more about our study on interstellar turbulence here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The spectrum of magnetized turbulence in the interstellar medium - Nature Astronomy Extremely high-resolution simulations reveal that interstellar medium-type turbulence significantly deviates from classical magnetized turbulence models.

Extremely high-resolution simulations reveal that interstellar medium-type turbulence significantly deviates from classical magnetized turbulence models. @astromagnetism.bsky.social et al.: https://bit.ly/43txE8a / https://bit.ly/3GP2csr

Astrophysicists are exploring our galaxy’s magnetic turbulence in unprecedented detail using a new computer model

Self-similarity!

"I love doing turbulence research because of its universality,” says Beattie. “It looks the same whether you’re looking at the plasma between galaxies, within the solar system, in a cup of coffee or in Van Gogh’s The Starry Night."

www.artsci.utoronto.ca/news/astroph...

The cascade of kinetic and magnetic energy from large to small scales in galactic-style turbulence behaves significantly different to the theoretical models that we regularly assume work.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Published in @natastron.nature.com

Comparison of magnetic diffusion and reconnection in ideal and resistive relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, ideal magnetodynamics and resistive force-free electrodynamics High-energy astrophysical systems and compact objects are frequently modeled using ideal relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) or force-free electrodynamic (FFE) simulations, with the underlying assu...

🔥 Hot off the press 🔥 @michaelpgrehan.bsky.social, grad student in CITA’s plasma astro group (@bartripperda.bsky.social’s group) shows that relativistic reconnection is invariant to the underlying model: ideal, resistive MHD, MD, force free electrodynamics, doesn’t matter… arxiv.org/abs/2503.20013

It’s depressing enough that so many people live in manufactured-reality bubbles where they could believe that universities are “factories of Maoist cadres.” Worse that one of them is an opinion columnist for the New York Times.

Click to expand!

A Kelvin Helmholtz instability growing in time from the bottom to the top of the visualisation.

Growing magnetized Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities

Unbelievable.

This is crazy. As someone who was a FBer operating on a very tight FB budget, this would have been terminal. FB enabled me to connect with the people that offered me a job for my current position.

It’s so sad seeing much of what has made the US a leader in the research be forcefully deleted.

Donald Trump's America is about getting what you want… if you’ve got billions to spend:

Citizenship, for a few million.

A tax cut for your corporation, if you've given a few million.

Even U.S. military protection, if you’ll give up mineral rights worth a few billion.

Anything for a buck.

My first poster since 2017… dynamos in merging neutron stars in NY this week 🤩🤩🤩

Just ctrl+f’d \nabla in my latest work… 289 \nablas… that has got to be a record of some kind.

Last week we submitted a study to ApJL confronting the predictions from weakly compressible MHD theory with extremely high Re simulations and in situ measurements of Earth’s high beta magnetosheath, showing agreement between theory, simulation and observations. arxiv.org/abs/2502.08883

Scientists make ‘rare advance’ in tackling the oldest unsolved problem in physics | CNN Physicists have long tried to model the chaotic phenomenon of turbulence. Now, a team has pioneered a new quantum computing-inspired approach.

Political commentary… we’re saturated 🙅‍♂️🙅‍♂️🙅‍♂️. Turbulence commentary, ✅✅✅: I provided some comments to CNN on some latest advances using tensor networks to model high dimension PDFs in the context of turbulent mixing, check out the article edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/s...

A piece of toast, covered in the Australian spread, Vegemite, accompanied by a pile of shredded truffle cheddar cheese.

Vegemite on pan-fried toast with truffle cheddar cheese. Bold flavours. Truffle upfront with long lasting Vegemite tail. Truffle reenergises Vegemite, bringing out the natural flavours of vitamin B. 8/10.

I would say that the most serious/compelling physics models are more closely related to the former. But I wouldn’t say phase transition, more like oscillating stuff related to the plasma around the neutron star (eg screening, jiggling plasmoids).

Not for emission. Emission, eg radio emission, comes from plasma. Not from magnetic field. Electric field matters more because it is electric field that accelerates particles. Twisting probably not key effect for emission.

Coincidentally in this talk with Sasha Philippov rn

You mean because there are too many emission models?

One of my colleagues put it nicely — “obviously, pointing out that the Power Law in The Sky is not all Kolmogorov is a big result”

YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute Cassiopeia A Light Echoes Time-lapse

Quite amazing — Cassiopeia A lights up the surrounding ISM with an expanding shell of light. This is not a projection of diffuse ISM, but a 2D slice in 3D. It is volumetric structure.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfmX...

So long Kolmogorov: the forward and backward turbulence cascades in a supernovae-driven, multiphase interstellar medium The interstellar medium (ISM) of disk galaxies is turbulent, and yet the fundamental nature of ISM turbulence, the energy cascade, is not understood in detail. In this study, we use high-resolution si...

New study in preprint. In this study we test if supernova-driven turbulence, a large component of the turbulence in our Galaxy, resembles classical Kolmogorov-style turbulence, as it is regularly assumed. It does not.

arxiv.org/abs/2501.09855

🙌🙌🙌🙌

Anyone else completely left their \mathbf{…} era for \bm{…}?

Let’s be honest, star guts is the material, but turbulence is the structure 🤩

Mmmm hmmmm ☕️☕️

💯💯💯

Surely with the possibility of limitless cheap solar there is a business case for major GPU clusters in Australia

A springer spaniel with a Christmas hat on

The sweetest girl. Merry Christmas everyone!