Early in the pandemic, people were joking that they’d use the time they were at home to learn new hobbies, develop new skills, and otherwise improve themselves. I have to admit, I’m one of the many who invested in Rosetta Stone and said, “This Year I’m going to try and master a foreign language.” While I will admit my Russian is just as grammatically incorrect as it was at the beginning of the year, there are a lot of folks out there who have found the energy to do some pretty amazing things. One of these people is artist Judy Schmidt who used her 2020 to be part of a pretty awesome study of the galaxy IC 5063.

Back in December 2019, Schmidt – who goes by @SpaceGeck on Twitter – posted a newly processed version of Hubble’s images of IC 5063, commenting: Looking at this new pic of IC 5063 (from Barth’s Prop15444), trying to figure out if I can make a color image… hmm maybe not, but are these cones I’m straining to see real, I wonder? 

Over a series of tweets, this scientifically knowledgeable artist, who had just set out to make something pretty, described how astronomers have often seen beams of light emerging from dust clouds, but had never seen the cones of shadow that theoretically should also occur. 

Professional scientists jumped into the thread, with William Keel pointing out that, “People have looked for crepuscular rays from AGN [active galactic nuclei], as detailed confirmation of how ionization” effects occur. This is a fun thread that we’ll link to in the show notes for this episode that includes the humorous quip from Schmidt that astronomers need “Look no further. Random image processor woman has posted [crepuscular rays] on Twitter. Good game, astronomers. Good game.”

And it was a good game that led to a great collaboration that produced a new paper in The Astronomical Journal that includes Schmidt and Keel as second and third authors, working in collaboration with first author Peter Maksym and a crew of many others.

This work is a reminder that the real difference between being a scientist and a non-scientist is reporting your work. Any of us could go out and quietly discover a new feature in our images or a new comet in our skies, but if we don’t share our work and find people to help us understand it, we aren’t really scientists. The only difference between Judy and I is I paid for ten years of college to get extra letters trailing between my name. We both co-authored one paper this year, and we both explain science on Twitter. Folks, be Judy.

This new paper details how it had long been theorized that light from an AGN passing through the core of a galaxy can be interrupted by clouds of material that cause the light to shine through in beams or to delineate into shadow cones, just like sunlight does when it passes through terrestrial clouds. This probably isn’t a rare occurrence, but it is one that is subtle and hard to see. It took the skills of an artist, trained to enhance details, to tease out what was already in the data archives.

According to lead author Maksym: I’m most excited by the shadow of the torus idea because it’s a really cool effect that I don’t think we’ve seen before in images, although it has been hypothesized. Scientifically, it’s showing us something that is hard—usually impossible—to see directly. We know this phenomenon should happen, but in this case, we can see the effects throughout the galaxy. Knowing more about the geometry of the torus will have implications for anybody trying to understand the behavior of supermassive black holes and their environments. As a galaxy evolves, it is shaped by its central black hole.

To go from detection to publication in less than a year is remarkable for any scientist, and my hat is off to this team that was brought together by Twitter and got their results through peer-review in such a beautiful fashion. I regret that I wasnt following Schmidt, aka @SpaceGeck before, but that mistake has been rectified, and I look forward to seeing what new details she finds to enhance in our Universe.

More Information

Space Telescope Science Institute press release 

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian press release 

“Crepuscular Rays from the Highly Inclined Active Galactic Nucleus in IC 5063,” W. P. Maksym et al., 2020 Oct. 8, Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint on arxiv.org)