Author | Lightnews

Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · 7d

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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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Sep 30

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

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc) @shengokai.blacksky.app · Sep 16

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.

Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · Sep 15

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.

3:164
• Make five years of payments — $200
million annually - and set up a $172 million fund for people with claims of civil rights violations.
• Ensure foreign students who are "anti-Western" will not be admitted.
• Pay for all costs of the settlement, including the fee for an outside monitor.
• Annually release demographic data for hires as well as students who have applied or have been admitted, broken down by "race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests."
• Make a public statement declaring that transgender people's identities are no longer recognized.
• End gender-affirming care for minors at medical facilities.
• Give the government access to "all
UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement" not protected by attorney-client privilege.

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Sep 6

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...

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Sep 1

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!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Aug 20

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!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Aug 20

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! 🔭🌌

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Aug 15

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!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Aug 13

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. 🔭🌌

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Aug 12

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... 🔭

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Jul 18

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

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Jul 8

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 🔭🌌🧪

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Jul 2

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!"

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Jul 2

🌌🔭 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.

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."

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Reposted by Thomas Rintoul

Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · May 29

"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)

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Reposted by Thomas Rintoul

Emily Hunt @emily.space · Apr 17

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. ☄️🔭🧪

Chris Lintott @chrislintott.bsky.social · Apr 17

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

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Apr 10

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!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Apr 9

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 🔭🧪

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Apr 3

Congratulations!!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Apr 1

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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A Swift analysis of the Eras tour set list and implications for astrophysics research (Taylor's version)

arxiv.org

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Mar 28

This is amazing! Thank you so much!

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Mar 28

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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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Mar 27

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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ESA Operations @operations.esa.int · Mar 27

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.

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Mar 12

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

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Thomas Rintoul @thomasrintoul.bsky.social · Mar 11

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

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