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Dr. James Beattie

@astromagnetism.bsky.social
541 followers 247 following 71 posts

NASA Hubble Fellow & Member at the Institute for Advanced Study | Ph.D @ourANU | 2022 Fulbright scholar @ucsc | Astrophysicist | Fourier transformer | 🇦🇺🇳🇿➡️🇨🇦🇺🇸

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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
This week I started my job at the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a job that I could only dream of as a wee guy growing up in rural Australia. Very surreal.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Excited to be one of the Hubble fellows in the 2026 cohort. I’ll be going to Institute of Advanced Study to continue my work on magnetic fields and turbulence in a range of contexts.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 24/08/2025
@natastron.nature.com’s cover looks amazing this month! Read more about our study on interstellar turbulence here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
Nature Astronomy @natastron.nature.com · 14/05/2025
Extremely high-resolution simulations reveal that interstellar medium-type turbulence significantly deviates from classical magnetized turbulence models. @astromagnetism.bsky.social et al.: bit.ly/43txE8a / bit.ly/3GP2csr
bit.ly
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.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
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...
artsci.utoronto.ca
Astrophysicists are exploring our galaxy’s magnetic turbulence in unprecedented detail using a new computer model
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
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
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
🔥 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
arxiv.org
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...
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
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.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Click to expand!
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Growing magnetized Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities
A Kelvin Helmholtz instability growing in time from the bottom to the top of the visualisation.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
Unbelievable.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
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.
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
Sen. Adam Schiff @schiff.senate.gov · 26/02/2025
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.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
My first poster since 2017… dynamos in merging neutron stars in NY this week 🤩🤩🤩
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
Just ctrl+f’d \nabla in my latest work… 289 \nablas… that has got to be a record of some kind.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
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
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
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...
edition.cnn.com
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.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
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.
A piece of toast, covered in the Australian spread, Vegemite, accompanied by a pile of shredded truffle cheddar cheese.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
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”
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
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...
youtube.com
Cassiopeia A Light Echoes Time-lapse
YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
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
arxiv.org
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...
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
🙌🙌🙌🙌
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Anyone else completely left their \mathbf{…} era for \bm{…}?
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Mmmm hmmmm ☕️☕️
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
💯💯💯
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Surely with the possibility of limitless cheap solar there is a business case for major GPU clusters in Australia
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 26/12/2024
The sweetest girl. Merry Christmas everyone!
A springer spaniel with a Christmas hat on
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Action shot 📸 CITA
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Read more about the intersection between The Starry Night and turbulence, with lots of commentary (and even analysis) from yours truly:
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
FB sent me this memory from 8 years ago — the last time I was an experimentalist working on a stellerator confinement machine at the ANU.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
❤️☕️❤️ Aussies do it best
A cappuccino coffee with beautiful coffee art in milk foam.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
What feels like two days later… I made it!
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
On my way back to Aus.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Nothing to see here… just @bartripperda.bsky.social working from his very normal, tartan wrapped office.
An academic meeting a student in their office. But half of their office is wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
The Starry Night with actual supersonic turbulence.
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
The Gini coefficient is the standard way to measure inequality, but what does it mean, concretely? I made a little visualization to build intuition: www.bewitched.com/demo/gini
Many circles of different sizes, representing a visualization of inequality
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Aussie dog loves Canadian snow
A springer spaniel dog with its face covered in snow. It loves the snow!
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
You gotta love the structure in turbulent magnetic fields
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Felt so Christmassy today
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Blackboard talk, done 😇
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Preparing a blackboard talk for tomorrow
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Noodles
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Playing around with AthenaK
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
One of my favorite plots for the year. The spatial distribution of the energy flux in a supernova-driven galactic disk. Red means inverse turbulence cascade, from small to large scales, blue means direct turbulence cascade, from large to small scales. The turbulence goes both ways! Mind-blowing!
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Simulated supernova detonating in a galactic midplane
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Reposted by Dr. James Beattie
gina ✨ @astrogina.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
"What The Fuck is up with these units?" is actually just every time a theorist and observer interact
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Tearing instabilities forming in thin current sheets in a turbulent soup
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Also super cool how potentially holes in crystallised NS crusts follow a diffusion process… and I mean standard vanilla diffusion… journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
journals.aps.org
Universal Diffusion in Coulomb Crystals
Diffusion coefficients for crystallized Coulomb plasmas are essential microphysics input for modeling white dwarf cores and neutron star crusts but are poorly understood. In this work we present a mod...
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
One mistake that I find is very common with working with undergraduates is having a decoupled visualisation / data processing pipeline. Creating a plot should always take seconds. The data should always be completely processed and written to disk, so that it can just be loaded to visualise.
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Dr. James Beattie @astromagnetism.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
So cool seeing some of my visualisations featured in Epsiloon magazine
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