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.

@natastron.nature.com’s cover looks amazing this month! Read more about our study on interstellar turbulence here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Extremely high-resolution simulations reveal that interstellar medium-type turbulence significantly deviates from classical magnetized turbulence models. @astromagnetism.bsky.social et al.: https://bit.ly/43txE8a / https://bit.ly/3GP2csr

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...

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

🔥 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

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.

Click to expand!

Growing magnetized Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities

Unbelievable.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

🙌🙌🙌🙌

Anyone else completely left their \mathbf{…} era for \bm{…}?

Mmmm hmmmm ☕️☕️

💯💯💯

Surely with the possibility of limitless cheap solar there is a business case for major GPU clusters in Australia

The sweetest girl. Merry Christmas everyone!

Action shot 📸 CITA

Read more about the intersection between The Starry Night and turbulence, with lots of commentary (and even analysis) from yours truly:

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.

❤️☕️❤️ Aussies do it best

What feels like two days later… I made it!

On my way back to Aus.

Nothing to see here… just @bartripperda.bsky.social working from his very normal, tartan wrapped office.

The Starry Night with actual supersonic turbulence.

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

Aussie dog loves Canadian snow

You gotta love the structure in turbulent magnetic fields

Felt so Christmassy today

Blackboard talk, done 😇

Preparing a blackboard talk for tomorrow

Noodles

Playing around with AthenaK

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!

Simulated supernova detonating in a galactic midplane

"What The Fuck is up with these units?" is actually just every time a theorist and observer interact

Tearing instabilities forming in thin current sheets in a turbulent soup

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...

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.

So cool seeing some of my visualisations featured in Epsiloon magazine

Great times in Madison this week, with so many great discussions about all things related to compact objects