Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz194-explosive-neutron-stars/s-LN5j3IQcsQO
Today we have a brilliant show for you as we speak with Associate Professor Duncan Galloway from Monash University in Australia.
His research involves the rarest, most powerful and cataclysmic events that occur in our universe. Neutron stars colliding!
Transcript:
< Music: Pulsar spinning up, Gravitational Waves chirps>
Brendan: Welcome to the Astrophiz Podcasts! My name is Brendan O’Brien and first of all we would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on.
This episode is produced on Yorta Yorta Country.
And we’d also like you to influence your local politicians to do more to mitigate climate change by moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
We’re now in our ninth year of production with over 190 fabulous interviews with top scientists from all over the world. Each month we produce two fabulous episodes:
On the first of each month, Dr Ian ‘AstroBlog’ Musgrave gives us his monthly SkyGuide plus a unique astrophotography challenge.
Then, on the 15th of each month, we publish an interview with a leading astronomer, astrophysicist, space scientist, data scientist, telescope engineer, project manager, or particle physicist, and we discover their science journey and rare insights into how they think and conduct their amazing research into exactly how our universe works.
Our audio files and transcripts are available on our website at AstrophizDOTcom and this can be freely streamed from Audible, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and from YouTube Podcasts.
And today we’re zooming over eight time zones to the Netherlands to catch up with Associate Professor Duncan Galloway from Monash University.
You’ll love his stories!
Brendan: Hello Duncan.
Duncan: Hi Brendan.
Brendan: Today listeners, I’m here on Yorta Yorta land, and I’m speaking with Dr. Duncan Galloway, who I met earlier in the year at the Transients Down Under Conference in Melbourne. Duncan is a phenomenal research scientist, as well as being a phenomenological research scientist, and he observes binary neutron stars and cataclysmic explosions in space with optical telescopes.
He does satellite X-ray observations of accreting neutron star binaries and searches for gravitational waves and their optical counterparts. He’s an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University and contributes to a number of amazing Australian and international research projects.
He’s a lecturer with a love of outreach obviously because he’s here … and he supervises PhDs who are also making breakthrough discoveries.
Somehow yet he has generously made the time to tell us about his fabulous research into understanding how our universe works.
So thanks for speaking with us today Duncan.
Duncan: Thanks Brendan. It’s really nice to be here.
Brendan: Okay. Look, thanks. That’s great. So before we talk about your current research projects, can you tell us about growing up in Tasmania, please, Duncan? And would you tell us how you first became interested in science?
Duncan: Sure … I think I first got interested in science as a way of, you know, making sense of the world and understanding how things worked. And that was something that really appealed to me when I was young and still does.
Also, in Tasmania, it was a very isolated environment. The world was very far away and even mainland Australia was very far away. So a lot of the things going on in the world seemed very mysterious and you know that need to sort of understand what was going on was a real driver for me in science.
And maybe one other factor was I’m a real science fiction fan. I read a lot of science fiction beginning when I was young. I think I worked my way through Launceston’s public library science fiction collection and the kind of things that I was reading about there really, really fired my imagination and fueled that interest in science.
Brendan: Fantastic! So cool … so please Duncan … can you tell us a little bit about those school days and your earliest ambitions and, if your earliest ambitions changed and evolved while you were still at school
Duncan: Sure, well I think I have to confess that one of my earliest ambitions was being an astronaut … I wanted to go to space and so that’s … you know classic sort of science nerd goal.
But that sort of drifted away a bit I think as I, you know, as I went on in my school career and I did well at science and I really enjoyed science and maths. And then as I went to university and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,
I got accepted into medicine, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do that. So I ended up just doing a very general science degree with a bit of botany and chemistry and physics and mathematics. And I kind of just followed my way with the things that interest me the most and that ended up being the physics.
There never was any real overarching plan and I just followed my interests in what I chose in the later years.
Brendan: Thanks Duncan. Okay look, I’m going to drill down a little bit here. So after your successful school career, your first B.Sc degree … that had you looking a bit like a marine scientist. In fact, I found out you spent five years as an oceanographer in Townsville in Queensland before returning to study in the field of astrophysics.
And then you spent five years in postdoc positions at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA, where you established your research career with x-ray studies of accreting neutron stars that we’ll talk about later.
And then you returned to Australia to take up fellowships first at the University of Melbourne and then at Monash University where you are now in a professorial role.
Look Duncan would you like to tell us a little bit about … how your focus moved from oceanography to astrophysics?
Duncan: Yeah, I really enjoy telling this because I think it’s a real testament to how versatile a physics … and you know, more broadly STEM degrees are. So when I finished my undergrad degree and I did an Honours year in theoretical physics really or sort of numerical mathematics, but I think at the end of that I was actually really burned out … and I certainly didn’t want to go on and continue studying which a lot of the people in my cohort at University of Tasmania were.
So I just wanted to get out and get any job that I could and I applied for a bunch of jobs. I wasn’t selective and I didn’t really know you know what I wanted to do so just a scattershot approach to employment.
I accepted the first job which I was offered which happened to be an oceanography. And I always remember it was very funny, the advertisement that I responded to and one of the descriptions on the advertisement was,”knowledge of water movements in a topographically complex environment would be an advantage to the candidate.”
And I had no idea about any of that. I had not studied oceanography or never done anything in that area. Wasn’t even sure really what that phrase meant.
But I took the job and I really enjoyed it. We got to do a lot of field work. We were working on looking at movements of sediment in the northern Great Barrier Reef and in the Fly River Estuary in Papua New Guinea. And we got to do field work and got to visit Papua New Guinea a couple of times, which is a, you know, a really amazing country … really incredible landscape. And also, you know, go diving on the Great Barrier Reef and spending time on boats, putting in oceanographic instruments. And it was a really, really enjoyable time, and a really good opportunity to train as a researcher. But at the same time, it really didn’t sort of fire my imagination in the same way as my undergraduate research.
So after I worked in oceanography for a while, I started to, I guess … the burnout had worn off and I started to get interested in doing my own research again and I had the opportunity to do a PhD in Oceanography but it just wasn’t that interesting to me.
So I was looking around at other opportunities, and one of the people that was at University Tasmania where I did my undergraduate degree, he just got back from Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US after helping see through the launch of a new X -ray telescope.
And as part of that, he had some data from the very first observations of that instrument.
And my potential supervisor there said, “Oh, do you want to come and work on this new data?” And I said … “Oh, what kind of object is it?”
“Oh, it’s a neutron star that’s a creating material. It’s gaining material from a binary companion and it’s rotating rapidly and it’s pulsing.” And this all much like, you know, the kind of things that I was reading about in in science fiction stories, it really, you know, really fired my imagination.
And that’s what prompted me to make that change.
Brendan: Fantastic. And they are amazing objects.
Duncan: Definitely!
Brendan: Okay. So the plan for today is to focus on the science by having a quick look at your PhD and then hearing about your latest discoveries.
But first, could you just give us the broad or the big picture of your PhD research? Your thesis is titled “Spectrum and Pulse Profile Formation in Strong Field X -ray Pulsars.”
Now first up, can you tell us what first attracted you to pulsars? You’ve given us a hint of it earlier. And what are X -ray pulsars and are they common in our Milky Way galaxy or did you have to look further afield with these new instruments?
Duncan: Sure, well again so pulsars are in general these … these neutron stars … these very dense and compact remnants of medium sized stars about eight to 20 solar masses … we think … and so these stars go supernova and explode and what’s left is a neutron star.
And then … depending on the environment that the neutron star is in, there’s a couple of different ways they can evolve. One of the most common ones that we know about is the radio pulsars. And the pulsar part comes from that as they rotate, we see a variation in the radiation that’s coming out of them. And people talk about these as “cosmic light houses” … you can imagine beams sort of sweeping across the earth and allowing us to measure the spin period.
And the x -ray pulses are a bit different though because they have a companion … and this companion will donate matter to them and that happens through you know basically just the companion swells up to the point where the closest side of the companion you know … the material can just stream off under the very strong gravity of the neutron star and then accumulate on the neutron star.
And because of the neutron star being so compact, the amount of gravitational potential energy that’s liberated is enormous. And so these objects become very hot and they basically radiate primarily in the X -rays.
And so in contrast to the radio pulsars where you get these radio pulses, these are mostly isolated neutron stars … with the pulsars with companions that are accreting, you get these X-ray pulsations and you can detect these pulsations and also detect the non-pulsed emission from these objects with X-ray telescopes which these days are mostly satellite based and they’re in orbit.
Brendan: Yep and what about the Milky Way Galaxy? Have we got them here or did we have to go and look in other galaxies for them? –
Duncan: Yep, they’re here, there’s not very many of them.
There’s sort of a few hundred in total of X-ray pulsars. There’s a couple of different sort of flavours and we distinguish these based on the mass of the companion because that kind of tells us what the evolutionary history is and how old they are.
And we have the kind I studied for my PhD … we think of as high mass systems that have low mass companions, although the one I studied specifically is a little bit more confusing.
And there’s also low mass systems that tend to be much older, and they spin much faster and have some other different sort of distinct properties. So a few hundred in our galaxy, and maybe a handful known outside.
Brendan: Okay. Now … oh … look, just to follow up on that .. For your PhD, you used data from some really interesting instruments, and I see there that you used the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
Unfortunately, both of them has been decommissioned and crashed into the ocean. Personal question here Duncan, were you a bit sad when they fell out of orbit?
Duncan: I was very sad, Brendan, and I was angry as well, because particularly with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, at the time it was still doing great science.
It was obviously quite old.
This is back in 2010, 2011. So it had been operating for 15 years, but the instrument was stable. It was doing good science.
And you know what ran out? It was the money.
And even though it was a very low cost mission … I think it was only costing NASA a million dollars a year, but they have to have new missions coming along and those missions can be very expensive.
This was the period when JWST was being developed, and as you probably know, that went way over budget; so unfortunately, the thing that forced the end of RXT was just a lack of money. And this problem has really come to the forefront now because another fantastic X-ray mission is also under threat … the Chandra X -ray Observatory.
And again, it’s a budgetary issue with NASA’s budget. So I really hope that that’s not going to be another case of where we’ve got a fantastic instrument, but we throw it away just because there’s not enough funding to support it.
Brendan: Yeah. Okay. I saw that the Rossi instrument, that data is still highly valued. It’s being used, it’s a great resource.
It’s still being used. People are discovering great things that are in that data set. What’s your current favourite instruments that are generating new data for you?
Duncan: Well, I have to admit, my current favourite instrument is not an X-ray telescope … it’s our GOTO telescope and that’s an optical telescope
But that’s because I’ve been you know working very hard to build that, but I think … you know … you’ve touched on a really important point about modern astronomy … it’s just that archival data availability … and you know all that RXT data is still available for free a NASA’s website and all the other missions including Chandra including and e-submissions, that data is all still there. So you can do amazing science with all that archival data if you have a good idea you wanna test.
And in fact, a lot of the work that I’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years has purely been based on that archival data and taking large samples of data from lots of objects and analyzing them in a comprehensive way to try and better and particular phenomenon across the board in a very holistic way.
So the value of that archival data is incredible. And it’s a really different environment for modern astronomers compared to what it was back 30, 40, 50 years ago before the internet.
Brendan: Yep, yeah, indeed. Thanks, Duncan. Well, let’s cross our fingers and hope that Chandra stays up there and keeps producing that amazing data. amazing data.
Duncan: Definitely …
Brendan: Right now, this brings us up to your current research. I had a look on the ArXiv server and found your most recent paper. And that’s about millisecond pulsars. And in particular, accretion powered millisecond pulsars. And thank you for explaining what accretion was earlier.
First up, what are millisecond pulsars, and could you take us a bit further? What are accretion-powered millisecond pulsars, and how common are they, and what are you learning about pulsars in binary systems in your current research phase?
Duncan: Sure. So the radio pulsars that I talked about that are the biggest population of pulsars that we know about, they tend to have, in the most part, spin periods of a few seconds. So the whole neutron star rotates every second or so, or maybe a little bit faster.
But if you get a pulsar with a companion, and if that companion is accreting onto the star, not only do you get those x -rays occurring, but the angular momentum provided by the material that’s falling on will actually spin up the neutron star. And if you’ve ever had like a bicycle wheel and you can do the experiment, you put the garden hose on the bicycle wheel and you can make the wheel turn by just the force of that water pressure onto the wheel. And it’s exactly the same process that spins up a millisecond pulsar. And so over this very long gigayear lifetime of accretion, they’ll spin up from a few seconds spin periods to milliseconds.
Brendan: Cool!
Duncan: So the millisecond pulsars are just pulsars that are spinning at millisecond spin periods, and so hundreds of times a second instead of once or a few times a second.
So they’ve been through this amazing evolutionary process that’s led them to this point. And there’s a lot of millisecond pulsars that emit in radio. There’s maybe, I think, perhaps a hundred of those, but the attrition-powered ones, which are the ones that emit in X-rays, they’re the rarest of all. And there’s only about 20 or 25 sources like that, that we know about in our galaxy. So that’s one reason why they’re so interesting is that they’re just really, they’re really rare.
Brendan: Fantastic! You’ve created a beautiful picture in my mind of a pulsar stealing energy from its companion.
Duncan: It’s amazing, it really is.
Brendan: It’s great physics … okay. Look, I see a lot of your astrophysics work involves modelling systems in supercomputers and then comparing the models with actual observations.
Could you talk us through this process in general, please, and how it generates new science and new understandings of things like Pulsars?
Duncan: Sure. So, you know, you can think of astronomers in a broad sense as divided up between sort of observational and numerical or theoretical. And I’ve been mostly an observational astronomer over my career, and so I take observations and I analyze them and I try and make sense of them.
But often when we want to make sense of an observation, we need a model. And those models can be very sophisticated, in which case you have people who purely specialize in that.
And all and all they do is try and build models and try and improve fidelity of those models and build in more physics.
And so both those activities are really important, but there can be a lack of communication between the two groups in that I understand certain aspects of the observations, maybe some subtleties in that that I need to communicate to the people doing the models, that they need to understand if they’re trying to match the models to my observations.
Brendan: Yep …
Duncan: In general, this matching process … if I’m trying to make a model and generate results that match my observations, the kind of parameter space that I have to deal with, the different astronomical quantities that go into that model,the neutron star mass, the orbital period, the spin period of the pulsar, the composition of the fuel that’s coming from the companion, all those things, we don’t know what those numbers are in many cases.
And so we need a way to explore that parameter space and kind of narrow it down and understand really what are the constraints that we can put on the properties of the objects, given the models and given the observations.
So one of the things that I’ve worked on a lot is to try and improve that crosstalk between those two groups and build new tools to make it possible to do more comprehensive analyses.
And that’s that paper that you mentioned, which was this software tool, which we call BEANSP with a P on the end, the P is silent.
And this was developed by a PhD student that worked with me, Adele Goodwin, who’s now moved on to Curtin University. And it’s basically a way to compare models and models of thermonuclear bursts that happen on neutron stars, including millisecond pulsars, to the observations that we get … and do it in a really comprehensive way, using a technique called Markov Chain Monte Carlo, so that we can get the best possible constraints on all the system parameters, all the parameters that affect the models, and get the plausible ranges of those parameters, such that the model predictions agree with the observations.
So Adele did all this work on a very famous millisecond pulsar.
And so the new paper is about applying that to a second source. So we’re really hopeful that we can go forward and apply that to a bunch of different sources and, you know, start building up a picture of what these objects look like, their behaviour varies between, you know, from source to source and what they have in common.
Brendan: Fantastic forensic physics! We interviewed Adele quite a while ago. She’s a fantastic researcher. We’re big fans here.
Duncan: Me too.
Duncan: Okay. Look, you mentioned GOTO earlier and I’m reminded that the questions can be more important than the answers.
Right now might be a good time to have a look at one of your current projects and the GOTO project. You’re the Monash PI of the GOTO project. It’s huge … and gravitational waves … I’ll go out on a limb here … may well be the flavour of the century but okay … we won’t get ahead of ourselves.
What is the GOTO Project and who’s in the team, what’s your methodology, what are your aims and hopes and basically how is GOTO going Duncan?
Duncan: Sure, so I got into this project in a really sort of indirect way and it came about because these neutron stars, these same pulsars are also potentially gravitational wave sources.
So about 20 years ago now I got interested in how LIGO was developing and you know at that time they were trying to achieve the technical milestone of reaching their sort of design sensitivity, and it was starting to look like they would really detect gravitational waves, which of course they did about 10 years later.
So I had a colleague at the time, Danny Steeghs, who was at Harvard, and I was at MIT, and he was interested in sort of binaries, and he’s since moved to Warwick (University), but we kept this collaboration going with a kind of focus on gravitational waves and neutron stars.
And since then, they came up with a design for a telescope to look for not just single neutron stars, but pairs of neutron stars merging. And so one of the best candidates for gravitational wave sources at the time was a pair of neutron stars smashing into each other.
And that would produce a very strong gravitational wave signal, but also an electromagnetic signal potentially, visible light, gamma rays, X-rays, whatever … and so his concept was a telescope that would be able to detect these flat optical flashes of light that were associated with the neutron star mergers and that way to get a precise position for them because the LIGO instruments can’t really localize sources very well. They have a very poor ability to sort of work out where on the sky that sources are.
So that’s how I got into that and we have been operating for probably about eight years now, I think, with one instrument on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
And last year was a real milestone for us because we started observing with our southern instrument, which is at Siding Spring in New South Wales near Coonabarabran.
And it was a great experience for me because I got to go up there and help, you know, put together the telescope and get it operational with the team from Warwick and postdocs and students from Monash.
And so we’ve been basically observing there at Siding Spring and La Palma and waiting for these things to go off. And the idea is that when LIGO detects a gravitational wave event of the right type, they send out the broadcast through the internet and our telescope will go and just start observing autonomously at both sites, if the conditions are right, but at one site, typically one site, it’s nighttime at one site and daytime at the other. And hopefully we can catch one of these events, which I think you probably know, we’ve only ever seen one before, and that was GW 170817.
So we’d dearly love to have other examples of those events.
Brendan: Ah, and I’m sure it will happen too. Fantastic!
What a beautiful project it must be …
Duncan: It’s really fantastic!
Brendan: … a lot of fun as well.
Duncan: Yep …
Brendan: Okay. Okay. Thank you, Duncan. So for our undergrads and our grads and our early career researchers listening … go and check out the GOTO project. It sounds amazing.
Now, another project you hinted at this before when you mentioned Siding Spring and the other project you’re working on is called “Explosive Astrophysics from Siding Spring Observatory Project” which is scheduled to finish up very soon.
I saw the finish date on it and I see that on this project you’re working with some great scientists up there like Chris Lidman, Ashley Ruiter and Anais Möller, Ivo Seitenzahl …
We’ve interviewed them before on Astrophiz. Wonderful people, very generous with their time. I got to meet Chris up at that observatory … and Siding Spring is just mind-boggling!
Could you tell us a bit about this project and the new arrays that you’re setting up there at Siding Spring?
And what a title! We love “Explosive Astrophysics”.
When will we see the final paper, or will it be a heap of papers? How’s Explosive Astrophysics going, Duncan?
Duncan: It’s going explosively, Brendan. This is a project of Chris’s, which is a really broad effort and a lot of people involved, but really it’s tied into the same science that GOTO is focused on.
And the way that GOTO works is … we go and observe the LIGO field, if LIGO detects something, and we’re looking for the one possible counterpart of this event. But because we’re observing such a large field, there can be other unrelated transients that pop up.
And a transient, as we call it in astrophysics, is just a new source that appears or changes its brightness. So when we observe these big fields, we get a bunch of transients and maybe one or zero source, which is actually associated with the gravitational wave event.
So how we distinguish the needle in the haystack, however you want to call it, from just the less interesting objects is we need spectroscopy.
And We need to take a spectra of the candidates that we have to try and identify what they are and if they’re a Supernova or a Nova or some other kind of event … we’re less interested than we would if it’s these Kilonovae, which are the counterparts of these neutron star mergers.
So part of the Explosive Astrophysics Project that Chris Lidman is leading is to roboticize the main spectroscopic workhorse up on Siding Spring, which is the 2.3 meter telescope, and has this amazing instrument that can kind of take an image of a field and get a spectrum from each pixel in that field. And so we can, for example, put it on a galaxy where we have a candidate gravitational wave counterpart, and not only get a spectrum of our possible counterpart, but get a spectrum of the whole galaxy.
So we can learn a lot of information from both the galaxy host and the source itself. But more importantly, when we can make this operate completely robotically, we can get it to respond really fast.
So we want to have a situation where we can detect something with GOTO … identify it as a plausible counterpart, … hand it off straight away to the 2.3 meter telescope and get a spectrum and be able to say within the shortest possible time … is that or is that not the counterpart that we’re looking for?
And that’s part of the goal of that project … to be able to really shorten those times and really identify those candidates promptly so we can tell everyone else about them and get everyone else in the world to point their telescopes as well at these very rare sources.
Brendan: Fantastic. Now, I should have asked you this question earlier. When you’re communicating these new events, do you do it through ATEL through the Astronomers Telegram, or have you got a dedicated channel to LIGO and VIRGO that sends you the information, the news flash?
Duncan: There’s a couple of channels, and it’s a complicated sort of landscape.
So LIGO and VIRGO has its own alert system, and it sends out alerts to observatory teams who can subscribe. So our telescope responds autonomously to those alerts.
So GOTO and other instruments around the world will just go and slew straight to the position that LIGO indicates in that alert system. And then if we find something, we can in turn send out our own alerts.
So the ATEL, the Astronomers Telegram is a very general system, but there’s a couple of different systems that people use.
One is called the Generalized Coordinates Network, which originally was for Gamma-rays, but now has been broadened to include things like Kilonovae and Gravitational Wave sources.
And so we put out GCNs reporting on our observations and if we have any interesting candidates, we’ll include it there.
But there’s also a separate website called the Transient Name Server, which is the official IAU website where you’re supposed to register new types of transient objects.
If we find something new, we also send it there whether or not it’s this interesting source that we’re looking for, because it might be interesting to someone else. We send it to the TNS so that anyone else who’s interested in those sources can go and look at it or get a spectrum or do some follow -up observations.
So there’s a lot of different sort of channels for these alerts, but it’s better to have more channels than not enough because we want to make sure that the information gets out in a timely way so that people can observe these things promptly before they fade … and while we have those opportunities to observe them.
Brendan: Fantastic, a worldwide web of collaborations happening. That’s beautiful. Okay, a little twist now. What about the nature of your non-research work at Monash University?
I can see your lecturing, your supervising students at PhD and Honours level. I know it’s unrelenting long hours and hard work, but you know, it must also be rewarding seeing the penny drop in your students and inspiring to nurture that next generation of top class astronomers.
Now you mentioned Adele Goodwin, fantastic. We talked to her just in the middle of COVID just before she won her PhD. Look, how is your current cohort of students going Duncan?
Duncan: Yeah, I really enjoy it. It’s a small cohort though. We just have one PhD student working with the group at the moment. But I’m really glad to have him because he originally applied in about 2020, and because of COVID and the travel restrictions, it took him until last year. So almost three years delay to get here and start his PhD at Monash. So that’s Sergey Belkin … he’s working working with us on the GOTO Project, and he’s been kind of spearheading our Gamma-ray burst response. Because the telescope is great for following up any kind of Transients … we follow up different kinds, including Gamma-ray bursts as well as LIGO events, and he’s doing a great job.
Late last year, we detected our first optical afterglow of a Gamma-ray burst after many attempts with GOTO, and that’s that optical flash that accompanies the Gamma-ray signal which is detected by satellite-based instruments and so that’s a really key step for detecting these Gamma-ray bursts and studying them because typically the Gamma-ray instruments that detect the Gamma-ray burst itself have again you know quite poor localizations and they can’t tell very well on the sky where these Gamma-ray bursts are coming from so you can’t find a host galaxy, you can’t get a Redshift and hence a distance, but the optical counterpart gives us the opportunity to find out all that extra information.
And so Sergey’s doing a great job on that and he’s also visiting the UK at the moment, working for a couple of months with one of our GOTO collaborators, Ben Gompertz at University of Birmingham.
And again, that’s one of the great benefits of being in this GOTO collaboration … this worldwide collaboration, is giving our students at Monash the opportunity to travel and to experience those different research environments and make those connections and do that networking, which hopefully is going to allow them to have a great career going forward.
Brendan: Yeah, well, I saw one of his papers, it looks like it’s going very well indeed.
Okay … Now, I caught up with you at the Transients Down Under conference in Melbourne earlier and you did your GOTO presentation there. What else is coming up for you?
… And for the PhD’s and early career astronomers who we know are listening, what advice do you give early career astronomers regarding conferences and networking and collaborations?
Duncan: I always give the same advice, which is these things are really important in science and in astronomy …. You cant just do your research, you’ve got to tell people about it. And so one of the ways that we tell people about it, at least in the professional community, is in conferences.
And I think it’s really interesting nowadays, having gone through this period during COVID when all of the conferences had to switch to basically being online, that we’ve basically demonstrated that you can actually run conferences online and they can be effective if you plan them carefully and think about the logistics.
What I’m really hoping is that having gone through that experience that people are more willing to host hybrid conferences where you can have in-person but also remote participation and there’s groups around the world and also in Australia that are thinking about how do we do that effectively because I think that really levels the playing field for perhaps students who are, you know, working in remote locations like Tasmania for example … or perhaps don’t have access to travel funding they can’t attend those conferences in person and so you know I’m really encouraging people who are organizing conferences to make them hybrid …. all conferences should be hybrid because that really makes them much more equitable.
And, you know, it’s because that networking aspect, even if you do it remotely, we know it’s not as good as being in person, but it’s better than not attending at all.
And we want all the students and researchers around the world to have, as much as possible, the same opportunities that we have from our privileged locations in Australia.
Brendan: Fantastic, and that is a great way of looking at it. Don’t get me started on Australia’s funding model for science.
Now, to sum up Duncan, you’ve painted the big picture of your research into neutron star binaries and accreting neutron stars and X-ray neutron stars … We’ve looked at your early research. We’ve looked at your most current work, GOTO and Explosive Astrophysics up at Siding Spring. We’ve gone all sciencey and you’ve painted some beautiful images in our mind of what these objects are and how we can look for their optical counterparts.
Would you like to tell us now about one of the things outside your academic and research workload that regularly brings great joy to you Duncan?
Duncan: Well I have to confess I still read a lot of science fiction and that’s something I guess that I still really enjoy and it’s that optimistic …. you know sometimes optimistic view of the future … we have storytellers telling stories in environments where some of the problems that we have to deal with today are …. you know … climate change and things like that are solved or we can you know go and visit other planets and really explore the universe, and so it’s always been something that drove my imagination and led me to science and so I guess that’s still a big part of my off-duty enjoyment.
Brendan: Fantastic! I also grew up on a diet of Philip K. Dick and Asimov. There’s a very long list of brilliant science fiction authors.
Okay, so you’re teaching, you’re mentoring graduates and undergrad students, you’re doing all of these collaborative projects,but somehow you also do outreach like this, and you post on Twitter or X or Mastodon. What about outreach?
Is it an important part of being an astrophysicist?
Duncan: I think it’s an important part of any scientist’s activities. I don’t do enough of it and I have to apologize.
But I think part of that is because universities and funding institutions don’t recognize it and don’t acknowledge it as much as they should. For me, I’m a publicly funded scientist,
largely. So the Australian taxpayer pays my wage, and I have a responsibility, and so do all such scientists, I believe, to be able to communicate the science that I do to everyone.
And obviously, a lot of the results that I get are very technical and they’re, you know, intended for a technical community. But I think the outreach part is about telling people in ways that everyone can understand what’s going on … Why am I doing this? What am I learning?
Is it really that interesting or am I just wasting my time? Astronomy isn’t an activity that generates a lot of commercial returns.
There’s no widgets that we generally create and sell. So I think a big part of the appeal of astronomy is just the ‘Wow Factor’ … the interest from just regular people and the mind-expanding nature of that research.
You know, here we’re learning about how the universe works and all these amazing objects and phenomena in it, and I want to share that with people and get them to enjoy it because I think that’s one of the main benefits of doing astronomical research.
So yeah, I think it’s critical. I should do more of it and again that’s why I’m so grateful for the opportunity to come on the podcast today, but I really hope that people enjoy listening to this and want to go and learn more … and it really fuels their interest.
Brendan: Fantastic. And last Saturday’s Aurora probably did a great recruitment job and did some beautiful outreach. Hopefully we’ll get a lot of potential astrophysicists asking ‘What caused that Aurora?’
Duncan: Heheh
Brendan: … So there’s lots of questions for people to go through. Now, unfortunately…
Duncan: Hard for me to compete with a show like that!
Brendan: Exactly. Yeah, it was beautiful.
Look, Duncan, the mic is all yours now, and you’ve got the opportunity to give us your favourite rant or rave about one of the challenges that we face in science or equity or representations of diversity or science denialism, which is one of my bugbears, or science career paths, or your very own passion for research, or that human quest for new knowledge, the microphones are all yours … Duncan, go for it!
Duncan: Well, you brought up the question of science funding earlier, and I think, you know, that science funding, and just particularly in Australia that lack of focus on science, on pure science is something that really frustrates me and is something that I’ve seen really going backwards in my 20-odd years as a professional scientist.
Our government is much more focused on practical outcomes of science. We want to have commercial products and I think that’s great to have commercial outcomes of science, but that’s not the main goal.
In astronomy, we have the great example of a piece of technology that came from astronomical researchers. You might have heard of it.
It’s called Wi-Fi. So that was developed from researchers at CSIRO, as you probably know. And they weren’t trying to find a way to communicate over the internet, over the radio waves. They were doing something completely different.
But this Wi-Fi technology came out of that, that pure research … that drive to just learn things, you know, curiosity driven research.
And I think if we, if we don’t continue to make a place of that in the Australian scientific community, we’re really losing out potentially on these amazing opportunities … these black swans as they call them, you know, these just completely out of the blue results that can really change the world.
So that really gets me down the way that, you know, science funding and support and the respect for science at parliamentary and even at every level.
The way the government will, on the one hand, sponsor a Prime Minister’s Prize for Science and have ‘Science Meets Parliament’.
And on the other hand, ignore this climate science that’s coming out that’s telling us that we’re in deadly danger if we don’t do something about reducing emissions.
So those sort of thing … It disturbs me and frightens me, and I’d love to see a better focus on pure research and a better acknowledgement of the role that science can play in making our Australian society and the world better, and real commitment to what scientists are telling us that we need to do, that we need to change to keep our place on this Earth.
Brendan: Exactly, and Blue Sky Science is one’s friend. It brings such great benefits …
Duncan: Absolutely …
Brendan: …And how in Australia, we can have a Minister decide, ‘Okay, this bit of research, I don’t like a look of it. I’m just going to stop it.’
And I think, yeah, we’ve got some structural problems in the way we administer our grants in Australia.
But we haven’t got the time to go into the detail of that but yeah it’s concerning.
Duncan: That’s another podcast … Yeah.
Brendan: Exactly. Okay Duncan, what else should we watch out for in the near future? What are you keeping your eye on?
Duncan: Well we’re in this really tense time at the moment when LIGO is observing again so they’re routinely detecting gravitational wave events.
I think everyone in this community is waiting for the next binary neutron star in-spiral. So like I was detecting few events a week, but most of them are just these, you know, boring black hole mergers.
Brendan: Hahahah!
Duncan: So two black holes, someone will be upset with me for calling them boring, but they don’t produce any visible light or anything else. So … so I say they’re boring.
So LIGO is detecting these things, but we’re not detecting yet these neutron star / neutron star mergers, which are the really exciting ones. So what I’m really hoping is that in the next few months, we’ll we’re going to get another one.
It’ll be visible to go to and we’ll be able to get on it very, very quickly, detect the counterpart, and you’re going to see some amazing science coming out of that if we can if we can get on that fast.
GW 170817 took 11 hours to find the counterpart for that. You know, we want to do it with go to in 11 minutes or even faster. So, you know, that that’s what I’m really hoping will … will happen in the next few months.
Duncan: Oh, fantastic. I’m sure you’re going to get it Duncan, we’re right with you there.
OK, look, thank you very much, Professor Duncan Galloway, on behalf of all of our listeners and especially from me, it’s been really exciting. I’ve learned so much in such a short amount of time. Thank you so much. And learning about the explosive nature of neutron star science.
And thank you especially for your generosity and your time. Thanks Duncan!
Duncan: It’s my pleasure Brendan. I really appreciate being invited. Catch you mate.
Brendan: Bye …And remember, Astrophiz is free, no ads, and unsponsored.
But we always recommend that you check out Dr Ian Musgraves’ AstroBlogger website to find out what’s up in the night sky.
See you in two weeks.
Keep looking up.
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The Astrophiz Podcast 