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Skylar Grayson

@skylargrayson.bsky.social

5.5K followers 160 following 610 posts

Astrophysics PhD Candidate ✨ studies black holes and galaxy evolution 🌌Science Communicator (find me other places at “Space According to Skylar”)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · Nov 17

Hi 🦋, I’m Skylar! I’m an astrophysics PhD candidate and a science communicator ✨ I do research on how black holes impact the galaxies they live in (amongst other things) but on here I talk about all sorts of stuff in the realm of space news, physics, astronomy, and general life in science stuff 🥰

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Reposted by Skylar Grayson

Astronomy on Tap-Valley of the Sun @aot-valleyofthesun.bsky.social · 5d

AoT Valley of the Sun is back for the next event in our monthly series! This October, we’re thrilled to hear from ASU Professor Jim Bell and PhD student Hailey Nelson about an ASU-led mission to the asteroid Psyche. (1/2)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 5d

Woooohooooo! I’m very proud of this work and excited to see it published ☺️

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 8d

Hoping to sprinkle in some sci comm here and there but there is so much going on I’m going to be a bit less active online than normal 😅

Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 8d

Sorry that I’ve been a bit quiet of late…in the month of October I have:

-7 fellowship proposals due
-2 invited talks
-1 overseas conference
-2 paper drafts to submit
-19 days of travel

Sooooo I’ve been a little busy preparing for all that 😅

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

This sort of thing is actually what I study-how supermassive black holes shape their host galaxies and the environment beyond! It’s very exciting to get results like this that start to peer into the mysterious hearts of galaxies, even if all they’re finding is more mystery ☺️
(6/6)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

But we want to understand, because we think the magnetic field is key to driving this weird thing in M87: a jet of plasma barreling through the galaxy at almost the speed of light. We see jets like this in other galaxies, and think they play a big role in how they evolve. (5/n)

📸: NASA, STSci, AURA

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

Here you can see the polarization fields observed in 2017, 2018, and 2021. Notice anything? They changed! They actually fully flipped! Which is…not expected. This points to just how complex and dynamic the accretion disk is, and how little we understand. (4/n)

📸: EHT Collab.

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

This image shows those polarization patterns overlaid with the lines, and really what this is telling us about is the magnetic field structure in the disk. But we’ve actually looked at this black hole more than once, and what we found…(3/n)

📸: EHT Collab.

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

This black hole is over six billion times the mass of the sun, and its size and relative proximity (50 million light years) makes it a very interesting target to study. One thing we’ve looked at is the polarization of the light we’re seeing-basically what direction are the waves oscillating. (2/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

Cool space news: one of the biggest black holes in the universe is doing something WEIRD!

You probably remember this picture, the first ever image of a black hole, in the galaxy M87. What you’re really seeing here is the disk of gas around the black hole. (1/n)

📸: EHT Collab.🧪🔭

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

Exciting new black hole results today! 🔭🧪

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

What is weird is that we gave that category the name “metals” (like we can be talking about the oxygen content in gas and call it its metallicity) but that’s just what we do! (4/n)

Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

Nowadays the universe is very roughly 74.5% H, 24.5% He, and only ONE PERCENT everything else. So really lumping it all into one category isn’t that strange. (3/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

So EVERYTHING ELSE has had to come after, forged through nuclear fusion in stars, or in energetic pathways during stellar events like supernovae. But stars haven’t converted that much of the original H and He into new stuff. (2/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 22d

I present to you: the Astronomer’s Periodic Table. Hydrogen, Helium, and….everything else is a metal.

But why? Well, mostly because there’s not much out there besides the first two elements. In the early universe, nothing could form except H, He, and a tiny bit of Li and Be. (1/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

Why is he sleeping like this? 😂

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

Should we be excited about the recent results from Mars? Absolutely! But we also need to understand exactly what they do, and do not, mean. 🧪🔭

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

If you want a more detailed breakdown of the discovery, find it here: bsky.app/profile/skyl...

Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 28d

Did we find life on Mars??? Well, no, but we did find maybe the best potential evidence yet. Let’s break it down 🧪🔭

Much like a toddler on a hike, the Perseverance rover has been collecting samples of interesting rocks it finds around the Martian desert. (1/n)

Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

Science, particularly the science of biosignatures, is hard. And discoveries aren’t always straightforward. Perseverance rover did NOT find life on Mars. But it did find something very cool that is POTENTIALLY a biosignature, that will guide a lot of exciting future research. Let that be enough! 4/4

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

This is by far the best evidence yet that life once existed on Mars (in the past, another thing people are missing)! But it’s not a certainty. And it minimizes the importance of these results and those still to come by overstating their significance. (3/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

There are abiotic (not needing life) ways these minerals could exist. It doesn’t seem like the conditions on this part of Mars lend themselves to the abiotic route, but it’s not impossible. We also don’t know everything there is to know about formation pathways of this stuff (2/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 24d

Here’s the problem about the whole “NASA found life on Mars” thing-they didn’t! 🧪🔭
What they found were some very interesting mineral deposits that could be a potential biosignature, caused by microbes at some point in Mars’ past. That is an amazing discovery! But…
(1/n)

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 27d

Gotta love old physics buildings that only have women’s restrooms on every other floor…because cmon guys we’re obviously not gonna have a woman on EVERY floor that would just be ridiculous 😂

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 28d

I appreciate your apology. Next time please consider my personal schedule when you have cool things to announce 😂

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Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social · 28d

Why are we getting big Mars news AND big gravitational wave news on the day I’m travelling???? Just atrocious timing 😅

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