Episode 36 - Dead Earths, magnetic fields and Galactic amnesia

Ooh

... my area of expertise, I would say.

So like fun, but also a bit nerve-wracking.

Oh, super fun to read them.

But yeah, I, I'm a bit like...

So apologies in advance for any mistakes that I'm about to make, particularly with my first one.

Uh, so the first paper I wanna talk about today is JWST Constraints on Primordial Magnetic Fields.

Ooh, magnetic fields.

I know.

And this is led by Malcolm Fairbairn, who's at King's College London, and, I mean, anytime anyone mentions magnetic fields in astronomy, I basically get a bit afraid.

It's like-

Switch off slightly.

It's the meme for a reason, right?

Yeah.

[laughs]

Like, the question at the end of the talk is, "But what about...

Have you considered magnetic fields?" And the answer is like, "No, don't understand magnetic fields." So yeah, I, I exaggerate slightly, but I do think magnetic fields, they're this really important and widespread phenomena in astronomy, right? They, they operate everywhere from the planet scales up to galaxy clusters and beyond.

So they're obviously important.

They are everywhere.

However, we often, and by we, I mean me, ignore them in astronomy because they're complicated and scary.

Mm.

Uh, and of course, the physics are quite local, and if you're looking on very large scales, you have to make a lot of assumptions about these things.

So they are quite difficult to understand, but they are really important.

So what we really want to do though is understand, you know, un- understand them better, and we know that they exist in various places.

They're important in certain processes, especially when you've got, like, jets and things like that happening around black holes.