Thomas Rintoul
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thomasrintoul.bsky.social
Thomas Rintoul
@thomasrintoul.bsky.social
380 followers 280 following 120 posts
🌌 Galaxy Evolution PhD student - Cardiff Uni ✨ MPhys Astro - Uni of St Andrews 2023 🎥 Science Communicator on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and TikTok 🔗 https://linktr.ee/ThomasRintoul
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Delighted to announce that the first paper of my PhD - "The role of magnetic fields in ram pressure stripping of satellite galaxies in the circumgalactic medium around massive galaxies" - has been published by MNRAS!

Check out the paper here: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

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What are the biggest pains with trying to make an introduction to astronomy video series is I know the things but I can't just be like "Trust me bro", I need references 😔

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Reposted by Thomas Rintoul
Were I the president or chancellor of any institution subject to these demands, my response would be "make me, you fascist fuck."

And then I would sic university counsel on them and seek the support of the rest of the institutions in my university system to form a unified front against this shit.
These are the Trump Administration’s demands on UCLA, in addition to a 1.2 billion dollar fine, as reported by the LA Times today. I must note again that the Trump Administration’s attempt to use title vi to enforce conservative agenda items is flagrantly illegal.
Most of us don't want these morons in government. Unfortunately, our electoral system is almost as bad as the US so unless something changes, the next election could be a disaster pretty much across the board...
Today I pause my PhD to start an industry placement working with High Performance Computing in Bristol. Video coming on my channel soon talking about it!
It's with the Bristol supercomputing centre working on performance for the Isambard 3 and Isambard AI supercomputers.

Not far from Cardiff so not too disrupting to the rest of my life
6 months as required by my funding body. Should be fun!
I'm less than 2 weeks out from going on a placement and pausing my PhD research - I've got a lot to do but there's nothing more terrifyingly motivating than a deadline! 🔭🌌
For once, I haven't done a very simple silly error this morning. I'm reaping the benefits of past Thomas' effort. I set up my plot layouts in python in a very flexible way that's made making changes based on referee paper comments so much easier!
In today's episode of even allegedly smart people make very stupid errors...

I spent an hour trying to work out why my plots were well below the expected values... I had forgotten to change the units. 🔭🌌
Some days I think I've really grown as a scientist and what I do now is really cutting edge and interesting... then there are days where I'm triple checking every parameter in the simulations I need to re-run... again... 🔭
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 🔭🌌🧪
🌌🔭 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.
Reposted by Thomas Rintoul
"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)
Reposted by Thomas Rintoul
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. ☄️🔭🧪
An astonishing headline reporting on new observations from a team led to Nikku Madhusudhan claims they’ve found ‘hints of life’ on a planet orbiting a dwarf star some 124 light years away. What’s going on? (1/n) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭 🧪
Promising hints of life found on distant planet K2-18b
Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.
www.bbc.co.uk
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 🔭🧪
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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The team at ESA mission control has initiated Gaia's final manoeuvre. The spacecraft is now moving away from the second Lagrange point to prevent it interfering with any current or future missions near this scientifically valuable point in space.
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