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Asked by anon-219948 to Nicolas, Emma, Declan, Bella, Ali on 19 Jun 2019. This question was also asked by anon-219956.
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Bella Boulderstone answered on 19 Jun 2019:
Right at this very moment, ok.
I’m making light curves, which is looking at how the brightness of something changes over time. I do this by getting a telescope in Chile to take pictures every night of some galaxies (at the moment my favorites are ESO323-G77 and NGC3783, very snappy names, I know) in two different wavelengths of light, optical (like you see with your eyes) and infrared (like heat vision).
Cooler things emit light in infrared and hotter things emit light in optical which means that you can see light from closer in to the black hole if you look at the light that’s ‘hotter’.
I’m looking at how the optical light changes brightness over time and following that by looking at how the infrared light changes over time and expecting to see an ‘echo’. I think that the light from the infrared will do what the light in the optical will do.This is because the ‘hot’ light is being absorbed and re-emitted by the dust on the inner edge of this donut structure which helps to feed the accretion disc which feeds the black hole.
If I can see this echo, then I can measure the time that echo takes, it’s like space sonar, or space echolocation. If I know how long the echo takes, I know how far the light has travelled (because speed = distance/time and we know that light travels at the – speed of light.).
That is what I’m doing right now. I hope that was understandable!
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Declan Jonckers answered on 19 Jun 2019:
At the minute, I’m trying to figure out how to make space blankets out of some new materials. We have to use new materials because the spacecraft these blankets are for, are going to get hotter than any we’ve worked on before!
This means I have to:
– research the kinds of materials we could use (using Google, and other search engine)
– design and perform tests on the materials to make sure they will work!
– write reports for the tests, even when they didn’t go well!
– keep a track of how much this all costs
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Nicolas Bonne answered on 20 Jun 2019:
For most of this year I’ve been running workshops around the UK to help other science communicators, teachers and scientists learn how they can teach astronomy to people with vision problems. Right now, we’re putting together big packs of resources that we’ve produced (lots of tactile images, things that represent the sizes of the planets in the solar system etc), so that the people that we’ve trained can use them.
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