Exploring Astrophysics

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.

This episode Dr Du spoke about some of her work looking at the physical properties of the interstellar medium in distant galaxies. She also spoke about her interest in asgtronomy outreach and the kind of work she does as outreach manager at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. Listen to the end of the podcast to hear her advice on learning more about astronomy at a young age!

In this episode, Sven spoke to me about his work in gravitational lensing, and more specifically, a novel statistical analysis method he is developing. He also spoke about how he transitioned to astrophysics from studying math, as well as how his analysis technique could prove incredibly useful in learning more about the matter distribution in our universe.

I spoke to Dr Leistedt on how statistics plays an important role in astronomy, as well as why astronomy is somewhat unique in comparison to other fields of physics such as particle physics. In addition, we spoke more about astronomical datasets, and how the sheer amount of data makes it more difficult to process as well as how even hardware imprecisions have to be taken into account when projects are conducted.

In this episode we looked at how astrophysical simulations can never be completely realistic due to the sheer scale of the universe, and how computational astrophysicists have to work around that. Prof. Diemer also spoke about his project with a textile specialist, fabricoftheuniverse.org, which tries to visualise dark matter data in a unique ways, such as representing the data as 3D woven textiles.