So Stephen, you are a Reader in Cosmology
but you’re also Head of Astronomy here at
the Open University.
For my sins, yes.
So can you start off by telling me a little
bit about your research? How you got in to
that area and why we’re standing in front
of a big rock?
Ah, right. Well this is no ordinary rock.
This fell out of the sky. This is an iron
meteorite and to me it is genuinely amazing
that you can touch something that has come
from out of space. And you feel it, it’s
heavy.
Yeah, it is.
It’s just humongous. Now from a solar system
astronomer’s point of view they will think
of this as an iron meteorite but to me as
a cosmologist this is an example of the sort
of things that would count as baryonic dark
matter, OK. So things that don’t emit light
but are floating around there in space and
we know that they’re there but it’s very
hard to know what they are.
You know it’s iron, and the carbon and water
and whatever that we’re made of. And the
protons and neutrons that make up all of the
everyday objects that are around us. But most
dark matter in the universe is not baryonic,
it’s not made of the protons and neutrons
and whatever else that we are made up of and
everything that we can see are made up of.
It’s something completely different. But
it’s very, very hard to detect.
And that’s the sort of research that I’m
interested in.
And have you found any dark matter yet?
Loads and loads and loads and loads and we’ve
found it from the warps in space and time
and that’s the sort of thing that I do.
So if I had really good eyesight I’d be
able to see something just skimming past you
and I’d be able to see it kinked slightly.
And that kink would be because I’m looking
through the warped space that you’re creating
around yourself, right. But we are too small.
We’re not massive enough to see these warps
in space and time but if you’re a galaxy
then you can see the warps.
Because galaxies are enormous?
Because galaxies are vast, that’s right.
And so that’s what I look for. I look for
these chance alignments of galaxies where
you’ve got a foreground galaxy warping the
space and time around it and a background
galaxy and we just look through, just past
the foreground galaxy and we see this warp.
And it’s an amazing thing. And it’s a
tremendous time of discovery right now in
astronomy.
It’s exactly the sort of stuff we do at
the Open University. And it’s also what
we try to integrate in to our undergraduate
curriculum, because I am a passionate believer
that this is what an undergraduate degree
should do. You should have some interaction
with the cutting edge of research. It’s
what universities are for. And so this has
to be part of our undergraduate curriculum
that you use world class space telescope data
and professional software to learn about how
the universe works.
And in fact here’s an example of an image
from the Hubble Space Telescope and it’s
the sort of image that we work with in our
undergraduate curriculum. And it’s very
beautiful. It’s just gorgeous. It’s a
dust cloud.
It’s not dark matter though is it?
It’s not dark matter. It’s a dust cloud
where stars are being born in our galaxy.
And it’s the sort of thing that we get our
undergraduates to work with in our curriculum.
So your research focuses on dark matter. Has
there been any kind of exciting developments
in that field because we seem to have been
hearing about it forever?
We have. Well in fact at the Open University
we had a breakthrough in this area and it
was very, very exciting. We were looking for
galaxies with a telescope called the Herschel
Space Observatory. And we found that there
were some galaxies that appeared much, much
brighter than seemed reasonable or possible
or even physically plausible. And it turns
out that they were bright because they were
being seen through a foreground warp in space
and time and it was magnifying the galaxy.
So we see these hugely bright galaxies. They’re
very rare systems. They’re dotted across
the sky but they are the places where you
have this chance alignment of two galaxies.
So we found that using the Herschel Space
Observatory we had a fabulously efficient
way of finding these chance alignments and
these warps in space and time.
And that’s where the dark matter is?
And that’s exactly where the dark matter
is. And we can see it where there are these
chance alignments. And it was very, very exciting.
It was part of this revolution that is happening
in gravitational lensing right now.
And it is certainly something that is part
of our undergraduate curriculum. So this is
something you learn about in our final level
astronomy programme.
So that’s your research and teaching. But
the Open University is famous for its open
educational resources online. Are you involved
in that side of things at all?
In some things and it’s one of the marvellous
things about being at the Open University
is that we have this open education mission
and we create all of these resources and it’s
just fabulous.
So, for example, one thing that I’ve been
involved with are the 60 Second Adventures.
So these are 60 second cartoons, animations
where we explain a complicated, physical phenomenon
but we do it with gags basically. So David
Mitchell is narrating them and they’ve been
humongously successful. And it’s been so
much fun working on this.
And lots and lots of things. So we do BBC
broadcasting. We have blogs and videos and
things that we connect with that. And now
we’re interested in the International Year
of Light which is suddenly taking off. And
we’ve got blogs and videos and things that
are associated with that. So it’s fabulous
at the Open University in that we create all
of these open educational resources. So you
don’t need to be studying a degree to be
benefiting from the Open University.
Stephen, thank you. It’s been lovely to
hear your passion and enthusiasm for your
subject.
Alright, thank you very much.
