Exploring Astrophysics

Welcome to episode 30 of exploring astrophysics with me, Vikram Bhamre. Today I am joined by Dr. Kareem El-Badry, a researcher who works mostly in the analysis of binary star systems and has obtained the nickname ‘Black hole destroyer’ for some of his past work. Stay tuned to hear more about that!

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of exploring astrophysics. Today I am speaking to Dr Lynne Hillenbrand, a professor of Astronomy at Caltech who is an expert in the formation and evolution of young stars and the formation of star clusters. Dr. Hillenbrand spoke to me about trying to learn more about the evolution of these young stars, whose processes are often hidden behind dust and gasses from the Nebula it is in. Her work is partly focus on the properties of the circumstellar disc, a disc of gas and dust that rotates around a young star.

Today I am joined by Dr Maria Charisi, a postdoctoral associate at Vanderbilt university. Her expertise is in looking for Supermassive Black-Hole Binaries: which are systems that are formed during the collisions of galaxies and weigh well over hundreds of millions of times our Sun. Dr Charisi also talked about her experience in academia and how she would describe it to someone potentially looking for a career in research.

In this episode, Dr Simcoe spoke about his research involving spectroscopy to look back into the early universe and search for the first stars. He also spoke about another interest of his - designing and building astronomical telescopes and instruments - and how it first began when he was still in high school. Lastly, he gave us a sneak peek into the job of a director of a huge astrophysics department like MIT's Kavli institute and the work that goes in to managing it.

In this episode, Dr Panopoulou spoke about how every galaxy has a magnetic field, and by using the polarisation of light we are able to map the structure of this field in our galaxy. We talked about the difficulties of doing this, including the limited information the polarisation of light can convey and how hard it is to check the accuracy of any results.