Dr. Szilárd Gyalay 🪐

@szilardgyalay.com

1120 Followers 136 Following

Follow my adventures as a planetary scientist! At SETI/NASA Ames. UCSC & UCLA alum. Time Person of the Year 2006. He/him/ő. Views are my own.

An xkcd comic featuring four stick figures standing together in conversation. The second from the left states, “but according to leading fan theories, Jupiter’s moons may harbor subsurface oceans.” An annoyed stick figure at the right end exclaims, “will you *please* stop calling them that?” The one panel comic is captioned, “how to annoy scientists: refer to all hypotheses as ‘fan theories.’”
An xkcd comic where a stick figure is gesturing towards a bed, stating, “and this is one of our most popular models.” A second stick figure asks, “is it a waterbed?” The first responds, “No, it’s a hybrid foam—“ but is interrupted by the second, who states, “no, look at how it moves. I’m pretty sure it’s a waterbed.” The one panel comic is captioned, “Planetary scientists are starting to see subsurface oceans everywhere.”
Poster rolled up with an extra piece of paper that has a cat face doodled on it
Saturn's satellite Mimas is lit from the left, illuminating a large crater upon its surface that makes the moon look like the Death Star from Star Wars. On the left, text reads, "After redistribution of mass (such as an impact), a satellite reorients relative to its spin pole by true polar wander. This brings additional mass toward the tidal axis and mass deficits toward the poles. Reorientation incurred by a mass anomaly scales with the extra/missing mass but resisted by the tidal-rotational bulge's rigidity." To the right of Mimas, more text reads, "If Mimas has a subsurface ocean, then it should easily reorient after the Herschel-forming impact, bringing the crater to a pole if it is a cavity, or to the anti-Saturn point if it is a mass-concentration (a.k.a., "mascon"). So, then, why is Herschel Crater at its current location? Where did it come from?" To reinforce the text, the anti-Saturn point and the poles of Mimas are labeled. Further, Herschel crater is labeled, along with the equator and a few meridians to show that Herschel is centered a few degrees south of the equator at about 110 degrees west.
Picture of TV paused on a scene where a man in a yellow radiation suit holds a remote with a wire coming out
Screenshot of safari Internet browser app for iPhone. On it are the results of the Google search for “Gyalay Mimas.” Google’s AI summarizes the results as “ ‘Gyalay’ in reference to Mimas refers to Szilárd Gyalay’s research. A planetary scientist at UC Santa Cruz who has studied the internal structure and heat flow of Mimas, suggesting it may contain a present-day global ocean despite its seemingly inactive, heavily cratered surface. His work, often in collaboration with Francis Nimmo, analyses Mimas’s…”
Screenshot of a Google image search of “stegosaurus,” showing many of them illustrated as green with orange plates.
Two brown circles (smaller left and bigger right) that overlap in the middle where this KBO actually merges.
Monochrome image of two spheres, one is smaller and darker to the left, while the other is brighter and larger to the left.
Scientific poster with much text and many graphs.
Monochrome image featuring a bird's eye view of a crater with bright white regions in the center and just right of the center.
Peering at the limb of Mimas, where Herschel crater is along the edge of the pictured hemisphere. The diameter of the crater is a significant fraction of the circumference of Mimas.
Earth's Meteor Crater, which looks very square.
Diagram of a sphere with an oblate spheroid in its interior. The rotation axis is aligned with largest moment of inertia, while the long part of the oval is aligned with the smallest moment of inertia axis.
A view of a simple crater upon the moon, viewed from an angle that shows off its distinct bowl shape.
Socks with a pattern featuring pairs of otters holding sea shells and one another’s hands.
Black socks depicting the skeleton of a long-neck sauropod dinosaur.
Green socks with the faces of red pandas on it
Conference audience seating that all faces the same way, but has about a foot’s worth of space between each seat instead of being a continual row of seats.
View of the sunrise from a left window of a plane. The front of the plane engine juts from the bottom left corner, and a window edge borders the right side of the image. In the background, a dark landscape is highlighted with snow-capped mountaintops. A gradient of orange-yellow-blue rises over the horizon as the plane flies towards the sunrise.
A white tabletop with a puzzle in progress.
screenshot snippets from the new Io paper, "Io’s tidal response precludes a shallow magma ocean" by Park et al. (2024) in Nature. The first snippet is the beginning of a section titled "Io's lack of a shallow magma ocean," which reads "Our results indicate that a shallow global magma ocean in Io does not exist, and these findings are supported by our current knowledge of Io's long-wavelength shape [Reference 39]." The second snippet is from the reference list, showing 39 is "Gyalay, S. & Nimmo, F. Io's Long-Wavelength Topography as a Probe for a Subsurface Magma OCean. Geophys Res Lett 51, e2023GL106993 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL106993"
My Spotify Wrapped, showing my 5 top artists as ASKII, BAND-MAID, Michael Ghelfi, Olivia Rodrigo, and Taylor Swift. My 5 top songs were “Centuries,” “bad idea right?”, “brutal,” “Scatterbrain,” and “…Baby One More… [title cut off in the image].” I listened to 17,050 minutes.
A shiny black and white snake curls and rests against herself atop a tree branch, underneath a leaf
Two people dance together with a crowd in the background. The man on the left sports a suit, red glasses, and dyed bright red hair. The woman on the right wears a cardigan over a flowery dress. They smile at one another while holding both hands. This is my girlfriend and I dancing at my sister’s wedding.
A man with dyed pink hair, red glasses, and a face mask stands in front of a scientific poster. It’s me. I’m that man. That’s my poster. In blurry text you can read the poster’s conclusion: “Io observations limit any isostatic topography produced by spatial variation in tidal heating to an amplitude less than or approximately equal to 0.3 kilometers. The resulting constraints on Io’s interior are prohibitive for a subsurface magma ocean.”
A Darth Maul figurine on his speeder above a pumpkin pie
Screenshot of a link display from an email I was sending. The top line in large, blue letters reads "Dr. Szilárd Gyalay." The middle line in smaller, black letters reads, "Using geophysics to study the interior of planets and satellites within our solar system." The third and final line in grey is the linked website, szilardgyalay.com.