Dr. James Beattie
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astromagnetism.bsky.social
Dr. James Beattie
@astromagnetism.bsky.social
520 followers 250 following 66 posts
Ph.D @ourANU | @Princeton and @CITA_ICAT Research Fellow | 2022 Fulbright scholar @ucsc | Astrophysicist | Fourier transformer | 🇦🇺🇳🇿➡️🇨🇦🇺🇸
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@natastron.nature.com’s cover looks amazing this month! Read more about our study on interstellar turbulence here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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...
Astrophysicists are exploring our galaxy’s magnetic turbulence in unprecedented detail using a new computer model
www.artsci.utoronto.ca
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
Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
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.
One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.
Click to expand!
Growing magnetized Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities
Growing magnetized Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities
Unbelievable.
Just got an email from the Fulbright Association. As of right now, funding has been cut off to 12,500 US citizens currently abroad and and more than 7,400 foreigner scholars and students in the United States
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.
Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
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
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...
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.
edition.cnn.com
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”
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...
Cassiopeia A Light Echoes Time-lapse
YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute
www.youtube.com
🙌🙌🙌🙌
Star gutz + turbulence + magnetic fields = 🥹🥹🥹
Anyone else completely left their \mathbf{…} era for \bm{…}?