Profile

Stars, like the Sun, burn Hydrogen in their cores turning it into Helium and releasing lots of energy as light and heat.  When they run out of Hydrogen then start burning that Helium turning it into heavier elements like Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen.  Finally, when they run out of Helium they stop burning because they’ve run out of fuel.  At this point, the puff off their outer layers into space, losing about half their mass, leaving just a hot core made from the ashes of burning all that Hydrogen and Helium.  We call this a white dwarf – white because it’s hot (really hot things glow white or blue, colder things redder) and dwarf because it’s small.  All the heat from this white dwarf makes the material that was puffed off before glow, and we call this glowing material a planetary nebula.  Nebula is a fancy word for a cloud of gas in space.  We call them planetary nebulae not because they have anything to do with planets, they don’t, but because the first astronomer to observe one also discovered Uranus and he thought they looked a bit similar.  Even though the name doesn’t make much sense it just stuck!

Anyway, stars are round so we’d expect that the material they puff off should also be round, right? But, when we study them we find that they show all kinds of amazing shapes (see the image below!) and we don’t really understand why.  One of our best ideas is that the dying star that formed the planetary nebula was actually orbiting around another star (just like the Earth orbits around the Sun), and that the effect of this second star is what formed the shape.  My work is all about trying to test whether this is true or not.

My days can be quite different, but fall into two main flavours: Days at the University and days at the Observatory.  So, I’ll try to summarise them both below.

At the University: I arrive at about 9AM.  Check for new results that might have been published over night which relate to my work (I have to make sure I know all the news about planetary nebulae in case someone else has found something important for my research), and read my emails.  I’ll probably have a few from my collaborators in other countries like the USA, UK, Spain and South Africa, so I’ll spend a little time replying to them.
Most days, I then have to go and teach a Physics class to Engineering students here at the University of Atacama.  This is really challenging because the classes here are taught in Spanish! For the rest of the day, I’ll be in front of my computer, studying the data that I have taken in my most recent visit to a telescope, and trying to see what the data tells me about how these planetary nebulae form.  I finish work at around 5:30PM

At the Observatory: I work at night.  This means that I sleep during the day and wake up in the evening.  I get out of bed just before sunset and have breakfast when most people are having their tea!  After breakfast, I head to the control room where all the computers which control the telescopes are.  I then spend all night taking observations with the telescope, deciding how best to use the time depending on what planetary nebulae are visible and how the weather is (if it is a little cloudy, I have to just observe the bright nebulae, for example).  When the Sun comes up, I close the telescope dome and head off to have dinner (just when everyone else is getting up to have breakfast!), before going to bed and trying to sleep until I have to get up again that night!