Profile

My love for all things space started at an early age…

Just like on Earth, everything in Space has a beginning and an end, so I look at what happens when a star reaches the end of its life after about 11 billion years (our Sun is currently about 4 billion years old). More specifically, I look at what happens when TWO stars orbit each other (in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun), and they start to die.

All stars are made up of lots of gas and dust, and eventually gravity can no longer hold all of this material to the stellar surface. At this point, it starts to be blown off into space and heated up to very high temperatures to form a very pretty cloud called a ‘planetary nebula’  (or PN, for short).  This nebula then hangs around for about 15,000 years before fading away to leave behind a very small, very cold star – a White Dwarf.

Here is an extremely high-tech representation of the basics of how a PN forms from a binary star (that I may or may not have drawn in MS Paint… I’ll never tell…)

1) A large ‘Main Sequence’ star, and a more compact, slightly younger companion, orbit each other.

2) The larger star evolves and gets bigger and older, to become a ‘Red Giant’. It can no longer hold onto all of its gas and dust, and so it starts to lose these layers into outer space. The companion star ‘sweeps’ up all of this material, and adds it to its own. The companion then also becomes bigger and older as time goes on, and the same thing happens – it too starts to lose its hold on the gas and dust, and starts to spit it out into the surroundings.

3) All of this ‘lost’ gas and dust is heated up to extremely high temperatures, causing it to ‘light-up’ – this is what we see as a planetary nebula, with a giant star and a white dwarf  star binary system at its core.

Here’s a real image of a PN, called the ‘Butterfly Nebula’ – I’m sure you can see why!

What me working usually looks like!

Being a PhD student time is pretty flexible – just as well, seeing as though I am an astronomer, and so much prefer nights to mornings! So I tend to arrive into the office at around 10am, and leave again at around 6pm.

The basic structure of my day is:

Make a cup of coffee
Check and reply to emails
Work for a few hours
Have lunch
Work some more
Sneaky trip to Starbucks over the road to get some better-tasting coffee
Last bit of work
Home time / socialising with work friends

Several times a week, we will have special talks from either people within the institute, or visiting speakers. They are generally fairly informal and relaxed, and sometimes even come with the added benefit of cake! 😀 These talks are a great opportunity to learn about other branches of astronomy and meet other people.
My work involves using various computer programs under the Linux operating system to look at and analyse data I have received from one of the many telescopes found all over the world. I have been looking at data from both the  Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, where I am now, and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia (I like that one because we have the same initials… AAT!), and now I am in the process of writing a paper about what I have discovered, which will eventually be published in a journal for other astronomers to read . Writing a paper is a bit like writing up the results of a science experiment in school, just with more technical language. So currently I am doing a lot of typing, and this work will eventually form a part of my PhD thesis.