Hi folks! I have some very exciting news! I was the lead author of a study published in Nature, which is the cover of this week’s issue! You can see it right now if you go to Nature’s website. We made a very exciting discovery and saw a supernova doing something it had never been seen before–chirping! We tied the chirp back to the birth of one of the most exotic objects in the universe–an infant magnetar–at the heart of the explosion, over one billion light years away.
I designed and produced the cover artwork myself in Blender (with help from collaborator Curtis McCully!) and wanted to share! If you’re on the reddit r/blender community you might remember my post from a few months ago (https://old.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1lhyno0/oc_animation_of_a_magnetar_a_neutron_star_with_an/) where I was experimenting with the design. I also worked with another astrophysicist to produce a video explaining our result, which features many Blender animations of the magnetar/neutron star system, you might enjoy that as well. Its here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSm5zW9eU8
I’ve been doing Blender for well over a decade (13+ years) as a hobby and lately it’s been becoming more relevant for my professional life! In the past few years, in addition to helping push the science case, I’ve also designed much of the graphics for the Black Hole Explorer NASA mission, an upcoming spacecraft that will take the first images of a black hole’s photon ring. Having the honor of having a Blender artwork on the cover nature is truly a personal highlight for me and I wanted to share the excitement with the wonderful Blender community!
Due to the popularity of the article itself, there is a lot of AI slop going around producing tortured variants of the image. I wanted to provide some behind the scenes screenshots in case it ever gets disputed which one is real/the original!
This is the best outcome for anyone using Blender — to use it constructively in a “real world” setting, and especially in a field outside of film and gaming. I created a music video with it recently, which is why I felt an appreciation for seeing you use it within your own profession.
The work is obviously well done and must have suitably impressed the editors for them to green light its use on the cover.
Which then leads me to ask: where are the aliens hidden? I heard that they’ve recently transitioned to using Blender — can you confirm?
Just having some fun. Great work. Congratulations.
Congrats for the discovery and the cover. It’s beautiful, it screams unimaginable power. I wished to be an astronomer or astrophysicist as a kid. Thanks for sharing your research with everybody.
Thanks so much @roland1 for the kind words, this comment made my day. I really agree, I’m always so happy when it feels like I can use Blender to augment something else or as part of a bigger project! It’s such a great feeling!
