Astrophiz196: Dr Lauren Rhodes ~ Explosive Transients

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Today we have a brilliant interview for you as we speak with a fabulous Early Career Researcher, Dr Lauren Rhodes from the University of Oxford.

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz196-explosive-transients-dr-lauren-rhodes

Lauren has just published a paper on the BOAT … the Brightest Object of All Time …  a “Once in 10,000 year event” The blast, called GRB 221009A, was over 100 billion times brighter than the sun.

Lauren works in powerful collaborations which use a variety of radio interferometers, such as MeerKAT and e-MERLIN to study the radio emissions from explosive celestial events including jets from X-ray binaries and gamma ray bursts.

She is using multi wavelength observations of these sources to understand each event’s jet physics and its surrounding environment. 

This stunning episode is available free from Audible Podcasts, Soundcloud, Apple podcasts and Youtube

TRANSCRIPT:
“Welcome to the Astrophiz Podcasts. My name is Brendan O ‘Brien, and first of all, we would like to acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, 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 Astrophiz-DOT-com and our three files can be freely streamed or downloaded to your favourite device from our Soundcloud channel, our free Audible stream, YouTube podcasts and Apple podcasts.

Today we have a truly wonderful researcher on the line, Dr Lauren Rhodes, who is uncovering the secrets contained in some of the most explosive events in our cosmos and she has some amazing stories for us.

You’ll love her work.

Brendan: Hello, Lauren!

Lauren: Hi, Brendan!

Brendan: Today listeners, I’m here on Yorta Yorta land in Australia and I’m zooming over nine time zones to Oxford in the UK and I’m speaking with Dr Lauren Rhodes,who is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford. Lauren uses a variety of radio interferometers, such as MeerKAT and e-MERLIN to study the radio emissions from explosive celestial events including jets from X-ray binaries and gamma ray bursts.

She is using multi wavelength observations of these sources to understand each event’s jet physics and its surrounding environment.

Now I’ve just been reading a paper in Nature Astronomy that Lauren contributed to where she helped to identify a possible Kilonova.

What a great name for two colliding neutron stars!
So a bit later we’ll probably find out what Kilonovae are and we’ll have a real blast!
But first … thanks for speaking with us today Lauren.

Lauren: Oh well thank you for inviting me to talk … I’m really looking forward to this.

Brendan: Pleasure … okay that’s great … now before we do talk about your explosive research work can you tell us where did you grow up Lauren and could you tell us how you first became interested in science and space?

Lauren: Of course. So I grew up just north of London. And I thought for a while I wanted to do like engineering or something. My granddad, he was in the RAF.

But it was actually my physics teacher at school. She had an astrophysics degree from UCL. And it was her that really got me interested in it from actually showing me her thesis.

And yeah, it was really amazing.

Brendan: Cool. Okay. Well look … how about you tell us a little bit about those early school days and your earliest ambitions and if those early ambitions changed and evolved over time?

Lauren: So yeah, I had this physics teacher, her name is Ms. Sava. She’s still at that school now, hopefully inspiring many more young women like myself. And it was just really amazing hearing that this was something you could study … but I didn’t really know it was like a career option or anything.

So when I was applying to university, I think I decided that maybe engineering wasn’t for me … like not so much of the hands on side of things is kind of my forte.

So I was like looking at universities and I saw that the University of Sheffield had this course and it was like 50/50 physics and astrophysics and I was like, “oh that sounds quite cool” … like I looked at all the subjects and she was like “I think you should definitely go for this … I think this would suit you very very well” and so yeah it was really her that encouraged me to go on and pursue physics as an option even if I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do once I even got to university in terms of like looking into my future.

But I just knew at that point, physics was what I was most interested in. So it seemed to make sense for the next few years to continue doing that.

Brendan: Excellent. Now we’re gonna talk a bit about mentors a bit later,but for the moment, let’s just go and look after your successful school career. You were awarded your physics master’s degree, and then you went straight to Oxford to complete your Doctor of Philosophy in astrophysics.

Now, for our early career researchers who are listening, could you tell us why and how you managed that transition from being a master’s student .. to going on and doing your doctorate?

And Is finding the right supervisor an issue for those who are thinking about doing their PhD?

Lauren: Absolutely. So as I said,I went to Sheffield, so I was actually there for four years. So I don’t have a Bachelor’s degree. In the UK, we have something called an integrated Master’s degree, which is where you can basically go to university for four years and graduate with your Masters.

And so during those four years, I did a number of projects in astrophysics. I was very fortunate I got to go to La Palma for a week, which is an island in the Canary Islands, just off the west coast of Africa, where they have many, many optical telescopes. And going and having those experiences, I was like, “Uh, this is giving me an idea of what research is like.”

And I just really enjoyed that aspect of it. I really enjoyed the learning new things. So I thought … “Okay, let’s see if doing a PhD is right for me.”

And actually I did a summer project at the end of my second year in my undergrad and it went absolutely awfully. I had no confidence in myself. I wasn’t very good at coding at the time, which is something turns out that you do in a physics degree.

I did not know that when starting out, but yeah, it was terrible.

And I thought, actually, maybe I wasn’t cut out for doing a PhD. And that really got me down actually, because when I was learning about astrophysics and space,

I absolutely loved it. And so it was getting to the end of my degree and I was like:  “Oh, let’s … let’s try and apply to different PhD programs.”

Um, I applied … applied all over the world, actually, to Germany, to Canada, and to Oxford, obviously. I actually applied … I tell this story so often to the incoming grad students.

I actually applied to work in exoplanets, to work with some of the professors here, and obviously that wasn’t meant to be, but I got this email from this guy Rob Fender, shortly after my interview at Oxford, and he was like, “Hey, I have this project on gravitational waves and transients.”

And I was like: “Oh, I don’t really know what those are.”

But we had this Zoom call and we had such a good vibe.

Like he really reminded me of the professor that I’d gone to La Palma with and we’d gotten really well. And so I came off the call and I was like: “Oh, actually, I think that would be a really good fit.”

And surprise to me, I got a contract through and an offer through like the next day.

And I was like: “Absolutely! This is the right decision!” … because even though it was on a field that I didn’t know anything about really, I had ironically chosen not to take the high energy astrophysics course in my fourth year of my undergrad, but I took the leap and I think that’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I absolutely love my PhD!

Brendan: Yeah. Fantastic. It sounds like a a roller coaster ride, but you landed right on your feet.

Lauren:  Absolutely!

Brendan: So the plan for today is to go back and have a quick look at your PhD thesis and hear about your latest discoveries and your project groups.

But first, can we cover a few basics that will come up in our conversation later today?
You mentioned transients before. Can you tell us what transients are and what GRBs or gamma ray bursts are and what jets and relativistic jets are?

Lauren: Yes, of course. Let’s start with transients. So these are a class of objects that are observed in space that if you look at the same patch of sky night and night again,a transient is something that will appear and then disappear over some nominal time scale. So this can be anywhere from milliseconds up to days or months or even years.

And it’s just the fact that you don’t see them and then you see them and then they will disappear again. So that is a transient. So some of these transients produce what we call jets.

So this is the best way I can describe it is instead of a spherical object being ejected from a system, it’s actually more like it’s a collimated outflow is often a phrase we refer to it as.

So it’s something that is very, very narrow …  Jets are produced when you have what we call accretion. So material is moving towards a central object.

Sometimes this is a black hole from some physics that we don’t know. There are theories, but we don’t know exactly how it happens.
Perpendicular to this material moving inwards, we have this very, very narrow ejection of material moving outwards. This is what we call a jet. If you look at the background image on the advert for this podcast, that as an example of a jet, you can see there. And now these can move at all different speeds, okay? So we don’t really know the full extent of what jets can move at … and where they can be ejected from their systems at. But the ones that I’m interested in are ones that move very, very fast. So we call this relativistic because the systems are entering a regime where their velocities are comparable to the speed of light, which is something that we never see in our day-to-day lives, like we just don’t experience this. So it’s very unintuitive a lot of the time. But yeah, so these things are affected by special relativity and they are important within general relativity.

And yeah, so that’s what a relativistic jet is. And a gamma ray burst or a GRB, as we call them in our community, astrophysicists really love a good acronym.. whether it’s a good one … And actually it’s obvious what it stands for … or it’s very convoluted.

Gamma-Ray Bursts are an example of light that is produced when some relativistic jets are produced. So when really massive stars die, so these are stars that are many, many times more massive than the sun, there is a very chaotic and explosive system, there’s a lot of energy involved.
And some of these jets are produced as the star collapses onto a black hole.

And these are relativistic jets, as I’ve previously described. And through the mixing of material inside the jet, it produces high energy emissions, so gamma ray emission in bursts, hence the gamma ray burst. And yeah, so that’s what a GRB is. It’s a purely phenomenological object.

We saw them in the sky in the ’70s with these military satellites, and they were burst of gamma rays, so we call them gamma ray bursts. So now we know what they’re produced by. Yeah, very circular kind of naming convention.

Brendan: Fantastic! Relativistic jets, okay. Look, your thesis is called …  The title is ‘The Astrophysics of Relativistic Radiotransients.’

Now, for our newest listeners, you’ve just told us what Transients are. Could you tell us what radiotransients are? Then could we get the big picture of your PhD research and what big questions were you asking? … and what problems were you working on during your PhD that you had to overcome?

Lauren: Yes, so radio transients are transients that produce radio emission. So different classes of transients produce light in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So as I’ve just said, gamma ray bursts … this mixing of material inside these jets produced high energy emission. But after that, so space is not as much as a vacuum as we like to think it is.

There is material surrounding these exploding stars and the jets interact with that material and it produces radio emission. And that’s kind of the main area that I was working on my PhD …. understanding what physics we could learn from these,

We call them afterglows, so the radio emission is because it’s coming after the gamma-ray burst itself. So this was what I was working on most of the time in my PhD, and I was using data from various different telescopes to do this.

And I guess one of the main things that I was trying to understand is how often is this radio emission actually detectable in certain systems.

So although we have incredibly sensitive facilities, we don’t always detect it. We don’t always detect the radio counterparts and we don’t know why. So that’s what I had kind of started thinking about my PhD.

I’m still very much thinking about it now. And yeah, so this was kind of like the overarching kind of theme to my PhD. But in terms of what I had to overcome … so I don’t know if you remember there was this thing back in 2020 called COVID.

That was a year and a half into my PhD … so that was really fun and not being able to be around anyone else meant there were no telescopes running really, so that was interesting … but luckily a lot of people collect more data than they can process and I was also one of those people.

So I had a backlog to get through and actually that kind of got me through like the majority of it and it enabled me to find time to start writing my first paper.

So actually, although it wasn’t the best time, obviously, I was not sat twiddling my thumbs for a long time.

Brendan: Yep. The cloud with the silver lining. Okay.

Lauren: Exactly.

Brendan: A quick follow -up, please. Can we go back a little bit? We mentioned supervisors earlier and you spoke earlier of how you became interested through some powerful guidance.

We know that ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ is it’s not just a cliche, it very accurately describes the incremental nature of how science progresses our understanding of the cosmos  … and so could you tell us about some of the mentors and supervisors and – excuse the phrase – ‘Guiding Stars’ who have given you generous support in your science journey.

Lauren: Yeah of course so the way my PhD worked was … I was spent most of my time in Oxford and some time in Germany.

But my main supervisor here in Oxford, Professor Rob Fender, he’s still my boss actually. And so he has been absolutely instrumental in my scientific career.

We don’t actually always work on the same things. And I think that’s been really important in me gaining my independence as a researcher and being able to come up with new ideas. But yeah, so he’s been who I work with most of the time, but I mean, science these days is incredibly collaborative and I’ve been very, very fortunate to get to work with many, many people around the world who yeah … who have enabled me to keep my excitement for my work. So for example, one of my, she’s actually just a close friend as well as a colleague based in Italy. Her name’s Sara Motta. So she was here as a postdoc when I first started my PhD and she’s since become a faculty member in just outside Milan. And although to begin with she was like a supervisor … like not a supervisor, like a mentor, I saw her as someone who I could try and replicate my scientific practices … like she was very, very good at her job. And now actually we collaborate and we are writing a paper together at the moment on some of these relativistic jets.

So it’s been really amazing to have these supervisors and then these like role models in my life. And now we’re more like colleagues rather than having this hierarchical structure in my career.

But yeah, there’s been so many people that have kind of supported me over my relatively short academic career. I’ve been very, very fortunate in that respect.

Brendan: Excellent!Thank you. Look, Lauren, one last thing about your PhD before we look at your current research, your thesis paper is fantastic.

I had a good read of it. It’s up on the Oxford website at tinyurl-DOT-com/laurenthesis.

It’s all lowercase, all one word. Go and have a read of it. It’s terrific. In it, you mentioned Germany earlier, and in your thesis, you mentioned the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. Now that’s a fabulous research institution. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your work there?

Lauren: Yeah, so despite having a PhD from the University of Oxford, part of the funding for my PhD came from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. I theory I was meant to spend a year there,

but as I previously mentioned, COVID …. and halfway through my time there. So Max Planck Institute is in Bonn, which is the old capital of West Germany. And I was working in Michael Kramer’s group there.

And we were doing some pulsar observations. So these are rapidly rotating neutron stars. And yeah, just doing some follow up of particular objects.

And But now I’m still working with them, so they have this very, very large telescope time awarded on the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa to look for one of these rapidly rotating neutron stars orbiting the black hole in the center of our galaxy.

But the amazing thing about that telescope is that although it can do this searching for this pulsar, it also takes images at the same time, and I am leading the image production aspect of that survey.

So although I was only at Max Planck for a very short period of time back in my PhD, I’m still working with them now. Yeah, it’s nice to continue that collaboration.

Brendan: Okay,great. Well, look, you’ve bought us right up to date. It’s now a good time for us to hear about an aspect of your post-doc research set which includes Kilonovas.

Now, what the hell are Kilonovas, or should we bring out our Latin and call them Kilonovae? Whatever we call them, they sound amazing.
Could you, Lauren, please introduce our listeners to your explosive friends, Kilonovas?

Lauren:  Yeah, of course. So, Kilonovae are …. let’s see how to best describe this … they are an explosion that are produced when two neutron stars collide. So,they are a less energetic version of a Supernova, which is what many people have heard of.
But they are incredibly rare … it’s something that we know. But we believe that they must be very important in terms of the metals that are present within a galaxy because we think that Kilonovae are where many,many, many of the heavy elements in the universe are produced. So these are called process elements and R stands for rapid. So you need lots of neutrons to produce these elements.

Hence, we think they happen in the place of neutron stars when they collide. And yeah, we know of just a few, we have confidently identified a couple, and my work as part of my postdoc has been helping to identify one of these such systems.

That was what our … that was a paper in Nature earlier this year. And my kind of role came into it because of these gamma bursts that I was talking about earlier.

I said they are produced in collapsing massive stars and that is a large part of my research. But we now know that since 2017 that these GRBs can also be produced by these colliding neutron stars.

So not only are these Kilonovae, these explosions produced in these systems, they also produce these jets. So if you think about these two objects spiralling inwards to each other … they then collide and explode, but because you have this very, very dense material, these neutron stars are incredibly dense, they could produce a black hole at the end … or in a slightly heavier neutron star, material falls in onto that as well as exploding, and is very messy, and launches jets.

So, These relativistic jets also produce radio emission like the other ones I talked about, and In order to understand the energetics involved in these systems we use radio telescopes to constrain how much energy went into the jets … Because that is a way of telling exactly what is going on in the system

It tells us about the geometry of the system, the energetics and the environment in which these systems are produced. So it’s a really nice complement to the Kilonovae that produce optical infrared and ultraviolet emission.

Yeah, it’s very, very messy, but each wavelength band helps kind of inform us on this…. like very complicated and rare puzzle.

Brendan: Oh, that is astonishing!Fantastic!

Okay. Look, just before we look at this very latest techniques and technologies that you’re using,I saw you’ve been using the SWIFT instrument and your colleague Marcus Lower, who we interviewed not long ago, he talked about a magnetar discovered by SWIFT in a previous episode.

So I looked it up and it looks like an amazing observatory hanging out there in space.
Could you give us an introduction to the Neil Gehrels SWIFT X -ray and UV Visible Life Observatory?

That’s a mouthfull, but it sounds like a beautiful instrument, Lauren.

Lauren: Oh, it’s absolutely amazing! So yeah, the SWIFT Observatory … It’s made up of three separate instruments.

So there’s the Burst Alert Telescope, and that is kind of a large field of view, high energy X-ray instrument.

And then you have the X-ray telescope, which is a pointed, slightly lower energy X-ray facility.

And then you have the Ultraviolet Optical Telescope, which observes in ultraviolet and optical. Surprise, surprise.

And these three telescopes are very, very complimentary to each other in which the BAT telescope, the Burst Alert Telescope, can see many, many different types of objects across the sky. And then once it discovers something, these other two instruments, the X-ray telescope and the Ultraviolet Optical Telescope, can go and follow them up.

So, sometimes it finds galactic systems like this magnetar that Marcus was talking about. I’m interested in it because it detects these Gamma-ray bursts that I’ve been talking about.

What’s amazing is, although it looks at the whole sky at any one time, it’s able to localize these objects very, very well. So, that means we can take radio telescopes and go point them over there as soon as possible and try and find the counterparts to them.

It’s an absolutely amazing facility. It’s actually on its last legs at the moment, which is very sad for the entire high-energy community, we’re really going to struggle if this telescope finally breaks.

But it’s very, very old, so it’s doing amazingly well for its age. I shouldn’t say bad things about it.
It might hear me.

Brendan: Heh! Okay. Thanks, Lauren. Now, what are you up to right now?

You’re in several research groups. You mentioned earlier that you’re leading an imaging team. What’s your primary focus and when can we expect to see that latest data that you’re going to be analysing and reporting on? What’s your deadlines and what are the timelines that are leaning over your shoulder at the moment?

Lauren: Well, – Yeah, I don’t know if I have a primary focus right now.

One of the things that I love and maybe I’m not so good at … is getting involved in loads of projects.
So my like primary focus right now is actually I’m planning to submit a new paper today.

So two years ago, one of these Gamma-ray bursts went off and it has been dubbed the brightest of all time or the BOAT.

So Simone Biles is the GOAT, this GRB is the BOAT. And it’s been incredibly bright in the radio and I have collated, if I do say myself, an absolutely extraordinary data set on this object.

I put the paper together, we’ve done kind of a little bit of modeling, like trying to understand some of the physics that’s going on. But because the data is so good, we’re in a regime where the models don’t work.

So it’s actually been really fun getting to go back to the theorists in this community and being like, … look …”This is the data. Try your best.” Like this is a challenge for them.

So I’m hoping to submit that today, and then I’ll be spending more of my time working on this program with Max Planck, doing imaging there. So I’m working with one of three PhD students at Oxford … and then one of the students who’s actually just defended his thesis, who is now a Doctor.

So we’re working together on that, but that will be something that happens over the coming years, just because it’s such a large volume of data, it can’t be done in a particularly quick manner.

But then there’s always new transients that are happening. That’s the great thing like my research field … is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen from one day to the next.

So whilst my primary focus right now is getting this paper out there, and then it’s also ‘Telescope Proposal Deadline Season’, so I’m writing a lot of proposals, something new could come along tomorrow and I just wouldn’t have seen it coming and we have to like kind of drop everything and react to that.

So it’s always very exciting and very unpredictable, but that’s what’s amazing and it means you end up working on many different timelines. You’re looking at the long term thing of the long-term timescales of like large data quantities … and then also kind of keeping an eye on the Transient Sky from one day to the next.

They’re hentetic. So we’ll watch out for the BOAT now. Is this paper going up onto the archives for server or is it going straight onto one of the journals. So we’ll submit it to a journal, and then we’ll go through the referee process. And then once it’s accepted to the journal, I’ll put it on the ArXiv because then it’s accessible to everyone. We’re not putting it behind any paywalls.

Brendan: Yep. Excellent. Watch out for the BOAT. Okay. Now, we know very well that science doesn’t always sail smoothly … and we’re very happy to put our propeller heads on for a short time, Lauren. Could you share with us some details of a particular part of this research that you’re working on that’s driving you crazy? … and you’ve mentioned the excitement… Is it doing both these things at the same time?

Lauren: Oh, tough question. Yeah, there is actually … so there’s a type of object that I’m working on at the moment so the Chinese astronomy community launched an x -ray telescope similar to SWIFT like we were talking about earlier, but it looks at a slightly different wavelength of X-rays and it’s detecting all these objects that we call fast X-ray transients And we just cannot work out what they are. So we’ve been observing them at optical frequencies, optical wavelengths, and then radio frequencies.
Each one does something slightly different.

And there’s no … yeah … they just aren’t really fitting in with our kind of what we thought could produce them and also with each other. So it’s … we’re just kind of all staring at the data and being like, “Oh, could it be this?” “Oh, wait, No, it can’t be this” for this reason. “Oh, could it be this instead?”

So it’s really exciting to be part of this, like, up-and-coming, almost new field, because we just didn’t expect this to happen. But it’s also, I guess I’m used to working on things where we know what they are. And we know we can, like, the science we extract … we don’t know what that’s going to be, because it depends on the dataset that we have at the time, but in this case, it’s completely new, which is amazing!

Yeah … so hopefully as they detect more of these objects, we’ll get a better idea and maybe these fast X-ray transients are produced by multiple objects that could be very, very possible.

Just yeah … at the moment we really don’t know and that’s really, really cool to be a part of that.

Brendan: That’s fantastic! A detective in search of a mystery and looks like there’s mysteries popping up everywhere for you.

Lauren: Absolutely! Really exciting.!

Brendan: Okay. Now, what about your work at Oxford? You’ve told us about the work you’re doing over at the Max Plank Institute.

Are you mentoring and supervising as well? Is that part of your role in your postdoc position?

Lauren: So I don’t have to do anything like that here.

Like there’s … it’s not written into my contract … but as of two, three weeks time, I’m getting my first ever student. She’s a summer student that’s here and going to be visiting for eight weeks.

And we’re going to be working on some X-ray binary data together.
Yeah, so she will be my first student and I’m really, really excited because having students and building a research group is such an important part of being an academic.

And I really love my job, so I would like to continue doing it for a long time to come. But yeah, so that is like one of the things that I will be doing in the future, but also I organize seminars here in Oxford.

So we have a Seminar Series that is for everything smaller than a galaxy. And I’m also the Postdoctoral Representative at the department level. So I get to go to staff meetings and hear about all the gossip that’s going on and we have organized like socials for the postdocs because especially since COVID postdocs can often get left out of department life unfortunately because we’re on short -term contracts and often they can just get left behind which is really sad.
So to me that’s really important part of being in like a big department like Oxford.
So yeah, although I do a lot of research, I also like to be involved in department life quite heavily as well.

Brendan: Yeah, fantastic. We’re gonna talk a bit about outreach a bit later, but look, I had a look at 17 of your published papers all up on the ArXiv server. And I noticed you mentioned COVID earlier. You wrote quite a few of them, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic when it was back at its peak in 2021.

And now, look, frankly, you’re not a member of parliament, so you probably didn’t get to go to any parties back then, but how did COVID affect you and your family? And what was the full impact on your astrophysics research and your PhD back then?

Were there any lessons to be learned there, Lauren?

Lauren: Yeah, so COVID was obviously a very interesting time. But the six months before that initial lockdown in March, 2020, I was living in Bonn and I happened to be visiting Oxford that week. We kind of knew that something was gonna happen. Like lockdown was coming. And at the time I was seeing someone who lived in Berlin, so as we kind of got told the lockdown was going to happen on the Monday I went to see my parents … they don’t live far from Oxford.

I got in my car and I actually drove to Berlin … which I would not recommend as a drive … it’s 14 hours and it’s horrible!

It’s very very boring … but I then spent the first six months of the pandemic there … and Berlin is an amazing place, but obviously we were still very isolated as a couple … like we couldn’t really do anything. but at least for me I wasn’t living on my own … whilst the same as many people did, my mental health took a hit and I’m very open about that with my colleagues and friends.

However I did realise that actually I did really love what I did. Like right, when you can’t do anything else really … we could go out for a walk once a day or something like that.

My work was really all that was there. And even though I was very, very young in my academic career, I loved doing my work every day. And I think that made me realize that actually, although at the beginning of my PhD, I didn’t think I wanted to stay in academia … I can’t imagine not doing this every day.

So even when I was stuck inside, I did just really enjoy it. And yeah, and I still do.
So I learned that …  maybe don’t drive to Berlin in a Fiat 500!

They’re not made for long journeys!
But I would say compared to many, many people, I was very, very fortunate that COVID didn’t affect me in such a horrendous way … in my family were all safe.

My brother was living with my parents and they got on as well as families would do when you’re stuck inside for six months at a time. But yeah, I would say actually, I mean, yeah, a lot of it is always luck, right? It could have gone the complete other way and I could have hated every moment of it.

It could have been so much worse. So I’m very positive about it.  

Brendan: Excellent! Okay, thanks Lauren. Look, okay, you’ve painted the big picture of your PhD and your postdoc work We’ve looked at your early research and your current work and the paper that you’re going to be uploading later today.
We’ve gone all sciencey just for a little while now Lauren … Would you like to tell us about some of the things that outside your research into extreme astronomy, BOATs, GRBs, jets and kilonovae.
What are the things that regularly bring you great joy?

Brendan: Oh, tough question. I would say there are two things primarily, I would say, that bring me a lot of joy. The first is really good coffee, like I must admit, I’m a coffee snob.
I like sitting in a coffee shop people watching … I love that! … and that’s something I get to do a lot in Oxford. We have great coffee shops.
One of the things I really take advantage of as part of being an academic is the travel I get to do.
Yeah … I’m very lucky … I get to visit a lot of places and I always make sure I attach holiday time on the end so I get to go hiking.
Next week, I’m actually getting to go to Innsbruck because it’s a train ride away from a conference that I’m attending the following week.

So me and two of my housemates actually … we’re going hiking and climbing for a week and just spending the time outside and just … yeah … really taking time away from our laptops and spending time together outside. Which I can’t wait! Yeah …  I love hiking and that like fresh air, like it’s very calming I find, which is not what my life is like at work.

So yeah, that really does bring me a lot of joy.  

Brendan: Yeah, sounds like great balance … fantastic …Okay, you mentioned your role teaching and mentoring.You mentioned that organizing conferences and colloquia.
Is outreach important for astrophysicists?
And have you got anything up your sleeve that’s coming along?

And has another research team snapped you up for the future?

Lauren: So outreach is incredibly important as being an astrophysicist.

At the end of the day, we’re in two respects, actually. So at the end of the day we’re funded by the government in the most part. So it’s very easy for members of the public to take a very negative opinion of funding our research.

They’re like … “Why are astrophysicists important to day to day life?”
And to that I say … “Well, just because something isn’t going to save your life in the next like five years doesn’t mean that culturally that’s not important.”

And I think outreach is a vital way of like communicating that aspect. But also, in terms of inspiring the next generation of astrophysicists …unfortunately, this is a problem in many countries, not just the UK … getting women into STEM and into physics is incredibly hard.
I was very fortunate to have a female physics teacher, as I previously mentioned.
And as a result of that, actually, my final year physics class at school was a 50 /50 split between women and men. And I didn’t even realize until I got to university that there weren’t that many women in STEM.

So I love my job so much. And I’m like … “Why should it just be guys that get to have this awesome job?” Like women do just as good a job … clearly as testament to me still being here.

And yeah, so it’s a really good way to show that like, okay, maybe every part of a physics degree is not the most fun in the world. But after that, there are so many amazing things you can do.

Even if you don’t stay in academia, there are so many important jobs that need physics.
And so, yeah, that’s absolutely like a vital part of the job we do.
And here in Oxford, we’re very lucky that we do a lot of outreach. We have very, very good support stuff that help with that as well. And they do loads of really, really cool events for the general public and schools as well … specifically targeting people that we know who otherwise would not get to see the effects of our work.

And in terms of what’s up next, so I’ve now been in Oxford on and off for six years, … for both my PhD and my postdoc.

But as of September, so three months time, I’m actually moving to Montreal in Canada. I’ve been offered a research fellowship there for the next three years. So I’ll be at McGill University and I’m very, very excited about that!

I love Canada! It’s a beautiful country and the people are so lovely!
So yeah, so I’ll be starting there for the next three years, which is super, super exciting!

I’m working with an entirely new group of people … so I’ll be independent, but I’ll be working with new collaborators and making, yeah, making new collaborations.
And yeah, I’m really, really looking forward to it! It’s going to be a very exciting chapter!

Brendan: Fantastic! Congratulations! We’ve looked at the CHIME instrument.
Canada’s got some beautiful work happening up there you’re going to have so much fun.

Lauren: Oh absolutely! Yeah! … they’re doing amazing stuff.

Brendan: Okay look it’s that time we’ve reached that time now Lauren.
Finally the mic is all yours and you’ve got the opportunity to give us your favourite rant or rave about one of the challenges that we face in science … in equity …  in representations of diversity … science denialism or science career paths … you’ve covered a lot of these areas already … or your own passion for research, or that human quest for new knowledge and understanding new mysteries.

You’re right in the thick of it!
The microphones are all yours!

Lauren: Oh, interesting. Okay. I mean, there are so many positives and negatives to having a career in research.

I mean, there’s infamously the two-body problem. So if you’re in a couple and you are both in research, it is almost impossible to get jobs in the same place … which causes relationships to break down. It causes people to have to leave academia unnecessarily.
Not because they can’t get a job, but they obviously want to stay with their partner.

Also in terms of women who are postdocs … although when you look at the statistics … early postdocs, there’s actually quite a high fraction of women compared to PhD students who are postdocs.

Unfortunately, the way that the current academic kind of job cycle system runs, unfortunately, the point at which people are expected to get faculty jobs happen at the same time that many women are looking to have children.

And so it means that a lot of women actually just can’t get a faculty job because they want to, and rightly so, choose to have children over that.
And they say … Okay, well, you can take into consideration like maternity leave and this sort of thing and career breaks. But statistics have shown that when parents go on maternity or paternity leave, actually it advantages men … because women end up, even if both parts of the couple go on maternity leave, the mother will end up still doing most of the work.

So actually the man gets basically free science time. This was a study that was done in the States a while back, which I think is really sad. Like, okay, we’re trying to help the system, and it’s still backfiring. And yeah, so that’s my current soapbox rant. I guess just disappointed with people that someone would take advantage of the system like that, but then again, maybe I’m still too young and naive to, I should be less surprised by this. But yeah, but then to not end on a really sad note about how trying to have a job in academia can be really terrible.

You get to do something that you love like no one is in academia for the money. I think I think we can all say that … and yeah, it’s amazing getting to work with people who actually love their job that come into work every day and I get to work with amazing people from all around the world.

I say to a lot of people I have the best job in the world … and I will always say that … I think it’s a really really amazing position to be in. I’m very grateful.

Brendan: Exactly! And I don’t think you’re naive.

I think you’ve hit a nail right on the head there, Lauren. We’ve got a similar situation here in Australia. I may edit this out, but I did an interview with one of our leading female particle physicists and she was looking at the data too.

And she said it’ll be 70 years until we get equity with males and females which is tragic!

Lauren: That is really awful !

Brendan: Yeah … okay  … thank you very much Lauren … now is there anything else that we should watch out for in a near future?
You’ve got BOATs … there’s mysteries landing in your lap every day  … but what else are you keeping your eye on?

Lauren: Oh, tough question.
The thing I am most interested in is the building of the SKA or the Square Kilometer Array.

So this is a humongous radio telescope that is being built partially in Australia and partially in South Africa. And it will be the most sensitive facility that we’ve ever had … and to be in my position now, as it is being like being a young researcher, as the facility is being built, I’ve had experience working on the precursor systems such as MeerKAT.

I am so excited to see what we learn from this facility because it is going to absolutely revolutionise radio astronomy.
And that is super, super exciting to be a part of that!

Brendan: Fantastic! I hope you get a chance to come out and have a look at SKA-Low over in Western Australia. It’s a beautiful set of spiders we’ve got out there.

Lauren: I can’t wait. One day. One day.

Brendan: Okay. Look, thank you very much Dr Lauren Rhodes on behalf of our listeners and especially from me. I’ve really loved hearing your stories. It’s been really exciting to be speaking with you and thank you especially for your time and your research schedule and the pressures to analyze all that data and getting that paper out.

It sounds like your deadline might be midnight tonight … who knows … and good luck with your next adventures and have a fantastic time over at Montreal, and all your future travels!

Listeners can tune in to the fabulous work that Lauren does, and there’s at least four research groups. She’s in at the moment over at Oxford, and you can see it all at tinyurl-DOT-com/laurenoxford. That’s all lowercase, all one word. May your career be full of BOATs and wildly explosive!

Thank you Lauren!

Lauren: Oh thank you so much for having me. This has been a wonderful experience.

Brendan: Excellent. Farewell for now.

Lauren: Goodbye.

Brendan: And remember Astrophiz is free … no ads, and unsponsored.
But we always recommend that you check out Dr Ian Musgrave’s ‘Astroblogger’ website to find out what’s up in the night sky.

So we’ll see you in two weeks for Ian’s August sky guide.

Keep looking up!