Profile

I’m an astrophysicst looking at the cosmic dust in galaxies that are right on the limit of what we can see.  They are so far away that they just look like fuzzy blobs, but we can tell a lot from those fuzzy blobs.  I’m trying to work out how far away and old they all are so we can track how galaxies grow and age.

To look at them we use a very fancy infrared camera, the Herschel Space Observatory that’s currently floating out on the other side of the moon looking at the universe.

Most of my days are spent in my office looking at all the information that’s being sent back from Herschel and trying to understand what it all means.  To do that takes a lot of answering emails, doing telephone conferences and writing programs to interpret data.  Once I think I know what I’m looking at I spend a few months writing a paper to tell people what I’ve done.  We’ve never looked at this bit of the spectrum before really, so everything’s new and no one really knows how to do it yet.

I have some untypical days as well.  Those tend to involve going to conferences all over the world or taking arduous trips to observatories in terrible parts of the world like Arizona, Hawaii and Australia.

For me astronomy and space was what really made science come alive but I never really had the chance to go out and look at them.  I know the same is true for many.  There are many schools that would love to set up some kind of astronomy activity club but buying telescopes and binoculars is not cheap.  I hope to be able to buy a communal telescope that schools can use, with a pack of fun activities that can make learning both fun and informative.