Thomas Rintoul

Does the apprehension around waiting for the reviewer report on a paper ever go away? Asking for a friend... 🔭

This week I presented my research on the "Role of magnetic fields in simulations of ram pressure stripping of satellite galaxies" at @nam25-durham.bsky.social

I also chaired a session at the conference which was a great experience to take on that responsibility as a PhD student!

#NAM2025 🔭🌌🧪

Two images of the magnetic field structure around simulated galaxies. Left shows a swept back structure to the field lines. This is highlighted with a dashed white line. Right shows an alignment of the field lines downwind of the satellite, again denoted with dashed lines. Text reads: "Stripping and mixing are less with magnetic fields because the field suppresses turbulence. It does this with a draping layer, reducing stripping, and by aligning with the tail. This matches the few observations we do have.

The ArXiV and Royal Astronomical Society logos. Text: What's next? My paper is now available on the arxiv pre-print server. This means anyone can read it, but it's still to go through "peer-review". Peer-Review is the process that happens after you submit to a journal where another scientist reads the paper and can suggest improvements. I have submitted my paper to the journal "The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society", a major UK-based journal for Astro."

Image again of simulated galaxies. Text: "In the meantime though... it's back to work! Conference season is well underway though, so I'll be off to present this work in person soon enough! Follow for more!"

A screenshot of my new paper on the preprint arxiv titled "the role of magnetic fields in ram pressure stripping of satellite galaxies in the circumgalactic medium around massive galaxies. Text above reads "My first paper is out now". Below reads "this paper looks at how magentic fields affect how gas is removed from galaxies orbiting other galaxies. Swipe to read more."

An image of simulated galaxies surrounded by lower density gas. Some of the galaxies have bright tails of dense gas behind them. Text above: "Galaxies are surrounded by an atmosphere of hot gas called the Circumgalactic Medium or CGM" Text Below: "Orbiting within the CGM, we find many smaller satellite galaxies".

A plot showing the temperature of a satellite galaxy with a tail of gas, relative to the hot CGM surroundings. Text: Satellites feel a headwind from the gas in the CGM - which we call Ram Pressure. If this ram pressure can overcome gravity, it removes gas in a process called Ram Pressure Stripping"

An 8 panel plot showing a galaxy with magnetic fields (above) and without (below) for various properties. Text: In this paper, we run simulations with and without magnetic fields to see their effects. Without magnetic fields, more gas is stripped from the galaxies. There's also more mixing of hot and cool gas - this causes more gas to cool onto the stripped gas."

🌌🔭 Excited to announce my first paper is out now!

We use simulations to explore the effect of magnetic fields on satellite galaxies in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) - the reservoir of gas around galaxies.

Read the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.18983

See thread for remaining images.

"Why should my tax dollars go to fund your astrophysics research?" A thread. 🔭🧪

Brushing aside how absurdly little of the federal budget goes to science (according to the Planetary Society NASA accounts for only 0.3% of federal spending), the benefits of funding astronomy fall into two camps. (1/n)

Reading more about this, I'm disappointed in the authors of this study & how they've turned a very marginal result into worldwide press releases.

In this climate, we as scientists have a responsibility to lead by example and represent our work accurately to the press. This is not that. ☄️🔭🧪

Yesterday went great! Today's off to a less great start... Went to go work on a project on my laptop in the office, to discover I had not uploaded the latest version to github from my desktop at home...
Guess I'll do that tonight and do this work tomorrow!

Something I'm really enjoying in my PhD in Astrophysics is that my actual work is presenting me all these opportunities to learn new skills for coding/software/data science/etc.

Today, my work has weaved its way to the point that I think it makes sense to learn CUDA so I can run my code on GPUs 🔭🧪

Congratulations!!

A Swift analysis of the Eras tour set list and implications for astrophysics research (Taylor's version) Popular culture plays a significant role in shaping public interest in science, and Taylor Swift's discography frequently incorporates astrophysics terminology. This study examines the occurrence of a...

April Fools papers on ArXiV are always a good bit of fun, but this one from @sophienewman.bsky.social and Ana Sainz de Murieta on the Astrophysical implications of the Eras Tour is one of the best I've seen.

arxiv.org/abs/2503.24188

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This is amazing! Thank you so much!

Working on a video about light pollution and dark skies, anyone know of any public datasets of light pollution maps?

Ideally worldwide but would settle for UK, Continental Europe and North America (ideally not just the US)

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Goodbye Gaia. Thanks for everything.

Gaia might never have been as flashy as Hubble or JWST, but it was one of the most amazing and most accessible missions. I worked with Gaia data in my undergrad and I hope we see more missions like it.

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@bot.astronomy.blue signup

This totally sucks and sadly isn't isolated to one area. I've seen maybe 3 postdoc positions come up in cosmological galaxy simulations in the UK this year - doing a PhD knowing there's probably no job at the end is rather depressingly motivating me to make the most of it while I can

I've always assumed it's just because the equations are the same? Like the Navier-Stokes (or whatever approximations to it we're making) applies as much to diffuse cosmic gas as it does to the ocean

Feel like @royalastrosoc.bsky.social is missing from this list?

Flyer for stand up for science--more information available at www.standupforscience2025.org

TODAY IS THE DAY! 🧪☀️⬇️

Join us at the Lincoln Memorial or your local site to Stand Up for Science!

I'm finding it closer to the LinkedIn end so far, but would love to see that shift more the other way...

I criticised the "echo-chamber" aspect of the BlueSky feeds initially. But right now when the world is just a bit too much to be constantly reminded of it all, it is nice to be able to filter down to just astronomy for a bit

@jostevenslabour.bsky.social maybe we can get some funding to keep Cardiff's staff and get a few more highly qualified researchers in Wales?

Hear that UK Labour? Huge potential here

Oooh I've been meaning to pick that up! Heard it's really good. Followed you on Storygraph too!

Thomas looking into the camera with his hand palm up. The words "Top Five Unsolved Astronomy Questions" are beside him. The background is an image from the Illustris TNG simulations showing the formation of a galaxy cluster.

My first science video of 2025 is now available to my patrons over on Patreon. General release tomorrow!

www.patreon.com/posts/my-top...

Oh absolutely. Yesterday was also plagued by the issue of being new to trying to do this at all

Big win today in PhD land - I got my code to run in parallel (using more cores so it goes faster)!

I spent all day yesterday fighting with this trying to get it to work. Came back to it today with a slightly different approach and it worked so much better! 🔭🧪

This is more that I've got too many things already in the air that need dealt with before I can do anything new

Ahhhhh!!! So much research to do... so little time...🔭

One can but hope! Like it's technologically impressive what these companies have managed to do. But it 100% does not need to be in EVERY product. And the environmental impacts ain't great to put it mildly...

Already scribbled them down when I was there cause they are about one hyperfocus from just yeeting from my brain forever!