Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astronomy-astrophiz-larissa-palethorpe-discovering-planet-b
TRANSCRIPT:
Brendan: 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 are now in our ninth year of production with over a hundred and ninety 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.com and our MP3 files can be freely streamed or downloaded to your favourite device from our SoundCloud channel, our free Audible stream, YouTube Podcasts and Apple Podcasts.
And today, to celebrate our 200th episode, we’re bringing you a sensational interview with Larissa Palethorpe, a young PhD from Edinburgh University who has discovered the most Earth-like planet yet.
You’ll love Larissa and her Earth-shattering research.
Let’s zoom over to Edinburgh to meet Larissa.
Brendan: Hello, Larissa.
Larissa: Hi, Brendan.
Brendan: Today, listeners, we’re celebrating our 200th episode with a very special interview as we introduce you to a most amazing researcher.
Larissa Palethorpe is a PhD student and astrophysicist who researches exoplanets at the University of Edinburgh … and Larissa is the co-discoverer of the most earth-like exoplanet yet, Gliese 12b … and it’s only 40 light years away.
First of all, congratulations on your beautiful science and thanks for speaking with us today, Larissa.
Larissa: Thank you so much for having me. I’m always excited to talk about the topic and it was a really exciting discovery.
We couldn’t believe it.
Brendan: Okay, thanks Larissa, that’s great. Now, before we talk about your exoplanet work and Gliese 12b, can you tell us where you grew up,
please? And tell us how you first became interested in science and space.
Larissa: Yeah, so I grew up in a town called Bracknell. It’s just outside of London, but I actually went to school in Reading, which is about 40 minutes away from where I live. And it was at school that I became interested in science and space.
More specifically, it was a geography school trip where we went to Iceland. I’m not entirely sure why I was on the school trip, because I had stopped taking geography during my GCSEs. But essentially we had this night stargazing and in Iceland, obviously there’s not a lot of light pollution because of the population. And you could see the whole Milky Way and you could see loads of shooting stars and I just thought I want to study that … essentially as a result of that, and I just became more and more interested in it.
I think it’s exciting. Space is a very exciting frontier. So why would you not not want to learn more about it?
Brendan: Excellent. So please, could you tell us a little bit about your earliest ambitions and if your earliest ambitions have changed and evolved over time?
Larissa: Yeah, so when I first kind of started at school, I was very much interested in English, the humanities side. I found maths and I found physics quite difficult as I went through my school years. I began to really love the problem-solving aspect of physics and maths, and they became my favourite subjects. And essentially, I decided to go to university to study physics because it was my worst subject at school.
I wasn’t necessarily bad at it, but I thought if I’m going to spend all this money and all this time learning a subject, why would I do something I’m already good at?
So that’s how I kind of fell into physics. So yeah, my ambitions changed a lot from when I first started at school because I was basically just kind of interested in humanities, but I fell in love with maths and physics and how they’re always pushing the new frontier again, essentially.
Brendan: Excellent. Okay. So after your successful school career, you did an integrated Masters in Physics with Astronomy at the University of Nottingham, then you headed up north to Scotland’s beautiful Edinburgh for your PhD in astrophysics.
Now, for our early career researchers listening, could you tell us how you arranged it all and why you made that big move up to Edinburgh to do your doctorate?
Larissa: Yeah, so essentially I just kind of Googled “studentships physics, Astrophysics” in the UK. I decided I wanted to stay in the UK just because it was easier at the time and I was doing all of these applications through COVID anyway.
But essentially I ended up having, I think, about four interviews around the UK, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Edinburgh in the end.
And Edinburgh offered me a place but also so did UCL.
So I was having to pick between the two at the time. but really I’m from England, obviously. But yeah, that’s how I ended up here. And I’m so glad I did. Edinburgh is such a beautiful city. And I work at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. And this is actually based in the Royal Observatory, which is on a big hill. And you’ve got a great view of the whole of Edinburgh through the office window. But yeah, it was essentially applying for a PhD. It takes a lot of perseverance,
I think it’s a long process and you do get rejections as well. But I think just keep trying in the end if you are a early career researcher because it definitely always works out in the end.
I know people who’ve had to apply for multiple years, but they get there in the end and they love it.
Brendan: Fantastic. That sounds great. And it also sounds like you don’t always choose the easiest road and you love going on the road less travelled. So that’s just beautiful.
Okay. Now, we know how important it is to have supportive supervisors and mentors. Would you like to tell us some of the people who have inspired and supported you as a researcher and as a student?
Larissa: Yeah, so actually there’s three people I’d like to mention. The first is Dr. Nina Hatch and she is at the University of Nottingham where I did my undergraduate … and when I was in my third year I did a small research project and I was paired with her as my supervisor, and I really enjoyed the whole research aspect and at the end of it she said to me that she thought I should do a PhD and I’d never really thought about kind of any further education in that way. My parents didn’t go to university at all, so it was kind of a strange new world to me. But she said she really thought that I should apply for a PhD.
So I took her advice and actually she mentored me through the whole process. I don’t think I would have been able to do it without her really because I didn’t have any of the knowledge about how you even go about writing kind of research proposals and things like that.
So she was really helpful and we’re still in touch today. So, yeah, I just especially want to thank her because I wouldn’t be where I am without her today. But then also I want to thank my PhD supervisors as well because they’ve been super helpful.
So my PhD supervisor here is Professor Ken Rice and he’s been really great through everything, kind of mentoring me, getting me to where I am, helping me publish my papers.
And yeah … so he’s been amazing. But also, I actually have a co-supervisor at UCL as well, because I should mention that when I said I was going to reject their offer, they said, can we write to Edinburgh and still kind of half -supervised you?
So I still work with a supervisor at UCL called Vincent Van Eylan. And he is, again, really helpful. He’s really helpful right now as well. When I’m thinking about applying for postdoctoral research positions and kind of guiding me through it … it’s really useful to kind of have someone who’s been in the position where you are now and tell you kind of the best methods and hacks and how to move forward.
So yeah … I would definitely recommend if you’re kind of thinking of applying for PhD to just reach out to someone in the department because usually people are more than happy to help and kind of give back because they know what it’s like to be in your position.
Brendan: Exactly. Thanks, Larissa. Okay, uh, look, the plan for today is to go back and have a very brief recap of early exoplanet science itself and then have a quick look at your PhD research program, then hear about your discovery of Gliese 12b and other projects and targets you’re working on.
So first, could we get the big picture on exoplanet science please? And we know that so far, over 5 ,000 exoplanets have been identified by instruments like Spitzer, Kepler,TESS, and now the JWST. But what have been the big exoplanet milestones that stick in your mind?
Larissa: That’s really hard to sum up.
Essentially, the field of exoplanet research is so exciting because it’s so young compared to other fields like cosmology, for instance, which have been around for a while.
It means that when you kind of attend these conferences, you’re hearing pioneers of the field talk and you’re meeting Nobel Laureates. And so essentially kind of the big picture is that the first exoplanet to be orbiting a sun-like star was only discovered in 1995, so about 30 years ago. And I think that’s the first major milestone, really. And then since then, the discoveries have really poured in. So I think we’re nearly at 6 ,000 now in just over 30 years, which is kind of astonishing. And the milestones come so thick and so fast. It’s really hard to. So I think we’re going to have a lot more kind of milestones in the coming years.
But that’s kind of the big picture, essentially, that we’ve discovered nearly 6 ,000 planets in a relatively short time. So who knows what more is to come?
Brendan: Exciting times, yeah. That’s so cool. Okay, now, let’s have a quick look at your PhD research to help us understand your personal research trajectory as it stands, and you’re focused on exoplanets obviously. Now what big questions are you asking and what problems are you working on that you have to overcome?
Larissa: So I more specifically work on small exoplanets …which is below 4 earth radii and more specifically again, I look at the ‘radius gap’ or the ‘radius valley’, and that’s basically kind of … of the nearly 6 ,000 exoplanets we’ve discovered, we don’t really discover planets in the 1.5 to 2 times Earth radius size range.
And no one really knows why. We think it’s indicative of how planets form … essentially that … baby planets can be stripped of their atmospheres by their host stars as they’re forming, and kind of end up below the ‘valley’.
And when we look a bit closer at the planets surrounding this gap, all the planets below 1.5 times earth radii appear to have rocky compositions, earth-like compositions … whereas all the planets above it, appear to be sub-Neptunes or Neptunes or a bit smaller.
And so thoser are the planets I’m looking at more specifically, because the first way to understand this problem is to add more data points to discover more planets around this size range and does this trend keep holding? … and what we think in terms of planets being stripped of their atmosphere so they kind of start off of sub-Neptunes and then end up as ‘Super Earths’ … is what we call the planets ‘below the gap’ , but this means we should see planets transitioning through the gap as they’re losing their atmosphere … and so that’s what I’m looking for more specifically, and we kind of want to understand this so we can understand more about our own planet … and how many earth analogues there are out there … and the ultimate aim is to cement how we understand our own place in the universe … that’s the big picture of my thesis.
Brendan: Lovely! OK. Well … that brings us to your highly-publicised discovery of Gliese 12b …
You worked with Shishir Dohlakia, an Aussie PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland. Now, a couple of questions come to mind straight away.
First, how did your collaboration with Shishir come about? And secondly, how did you discover this fantastic exoplanet and what instruments and techniques did you use to confirm your discovery?
Larissa: What essentially happened is that TESS, one of NASA’s telescopes, had identified Gliese 12b as a planet candidate. But because of the way TESS works, every so often it reorientates back towards the Earth to just transmit data down.
I think it was only two or three transits of the planet we observed, and so because of how far apart they were from each other, we weren’t sure what the exact orbital period of the planet …. It was either 12.76 days, or double that, 25 and a half days … and this threw up as a really exciting candidate because of the type of star it orbits … and if it was a 25 and a half day orbit it would have been firmly in its star’s habitable zone.
But, even if it was the 12.76 day orbit … which is what it ended up being … it was still kind of on the edge of the optimistic habitable zone, so we wanted to look a bit closer at it.
And so the way a lot of scientists did it, is they write proposals for CHEOPS, which is an ESA telescope, and I was the principal investigator of a CHEOPS proposal for this candidate, along with my team which are kind of based around the world … and we were lucky enough to have the proposal accepted last summer … but the European Space Agency accepted another proposal for the same target as well … and why don’t we work with the other team and kind of share the data and work together … and that was how Shishir came into the picture. Heh.
And so then we said yes, obviously, because collaborative science is the best science.
And so the transits for this planet then started pouring in kind of through the autumn of last year from the CHEOPS telescope.
And so we used the transit technique … Now I should explain a bit more about what that is.
Essentially, you kind of stare at a star for a period of time. And if there’s a planet orbiting it in our plane of sight, then it should pass in front of the star and you get a dip in the amount of light you receive from the star.
And from the depth of that dip, you can tell the radius of the planet, the planet size. And from the regularity of how often those dips occur, you can tell the orbital period of the planet,
which is essentially the length of a year on that planet.
And so in the end, so we mainly, because it was just a planet validation paper, so we were just saying, look, this planet is there. We know kind of the length of the year. We know the right temperature … so we just use the transit technique … but we use the TESS … NASA’s TESS telescope … we use ESA’s CHEOPS telescope … and then a couple of other teams got involved as well towards the end, so we used the SPECULOOS telescope in Chile … because there was more from my team at the University of Birmingham who worked with SPECULOOS a lot … That’s a ground -based, again, kind of transit telescope in Chile.
And then Shishir also brought with him Minerva Australis, I think that’s how you pronounce it, some data from that telescope.
That’s a ground-based telescope in Australia. And then we also had some more transits from the Purple Mountain Observatory, which is in China. So, yeah, we ended up with a lot of transits by the end, which is how we were able to get such a precise radius and orbital period of the planet.
Brendan: Fantastic! Collaboration is indeed the name of the game … and it sounds like you had some beautiful teamwork happening there. Beautiful science!
Now, look … the main question is … Let’s summarise …. What exactly is Gliese 1 b?
And What else do we now know about this exoplanet, and what makes it so special?
Why have so many people been so excited about your discovery?
Larissa: So Gliese 12b is our nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-sized planet discovered to date.
So just to break that down a bit, so it’s nearest, so it’s only 40 light years away, which is near in terms of astronomical terms … It’s not actually that close physically. But, yeah, it’s one of our nearest kind of exoplanets discovered today. And then we’ve also got transiting, which I said is how we discovered the planet. So essentially it just passes in front of its star at regular intervals.
It’s temperate, and because we know the orbital period, we know the distance of how far and we know the size of the planet and we know kind of the size of the star. We know how far away it is in its orbit … so we were able to kind of infer the surface temperature of the planet … which we believe is about 42 degrees Celsius … which is quite temperate … and it’s earth sized … in our paper we say it’s about 1 earth radius …
There was another team who published a paper at the same time and I think they found it to be about 0.95 … so it’s still kind of earth-sized … and it’s a lot harder to discover these small planets because the dips that they make when they pass in front of their star obviously aren’t as deep because they’re not blocking as much of the light … and so the fact that we’re able to just kind of discover this type of planet so near is really exciting …
And what makes it even more exciting is because of how temperate it is. And essentially, it’s hard to tell a lot about it now without further follow -up, which hopefully people will do.
My team are already working on trying to work out a mass for this planet.
But essentially, we think it’s kind of Venus-like, somewhere between Venus and Earth.
And kind of the way we define habitability on a planet, is we say there’s liquid water on its surface … And obviously at 42 degrees Celsius, liquid water would be a possibility, but we don’t know if it has an atmosphere and that could change things.
But essentially, whilst Earth retained its water, Venus did not. Venus once used to have water. The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus meant that the water escaped. And so essentially, looking a bit closer at this planet could tell us a lot more about the habitability pathways planets take as they develop … because Earth remained habitable but Venus did not, and we think it’s somewhere between that, so the more we learn about it, we’ll be able to hopefully tell us more about our own solar system, as well in its early days … and that’s kind of what makes it so exciting … so it’s exciting for a number of reasons … because it’s Earth-sized, temperate, and transiting … and yeah it’s a very exciting discovery!
Brendan: Ah … that’s fantastic. So, we’re looking 40 light years away and finding out more about ourselves. That’s just beautiful. Okay … thank you. So this brings us up to date with Gliese 12b. Now, could we have a quick look at the very latest techniques? You talked us through transiting and other techniques.
What sort of new technologies and techniques are researchers using to find, to identify and to characterise exoplanets that are orbiting those distant stars.
What else is exciting for exoplanet scientists right now?
Larissa: I mean, I think the main thing on everyone’s lips is JWST … heh … which was launched on Christmas Day in 2021. That’s going to bring out some very exciting science, I think.
We’re still kind of in the early days of it, even though it was launched a couple years ago now. But that uses spectroscopy. So again, with transiting planets, when they pass in front of their star, if they have an atmosphere, then the star’s light will pass through the planet’s atmosphere … and kind of looking at the spectrum when it gets to us can tell us a lot about what kind of elements are in this planet’s atmosphere … and that is really exciting because that is a way you could potentially detect signs of life … depending on what kind of gases you’re discovering.
So that’s kind of the world on everyone’s lips, but in terms of other techniques that are really important … again … transits but also radial velocities … um … these are done by ground-based telescopes … and essentially they are looking for little wobbles in a star’s spectra … and from that we can tell the mass of a planet and the good mass and a good radius which you get from transits and radial velocities is very much need if you want to tell the density of the planet, which is how you can infer the interior composition … so what kind of planet it is.
And we’re trying, radial velocities, kind of, we’re improving our technologies all the time.
The problem we’re having right now is that we kind of hit a radial velocity floor.
And that’s because some stars are quite active and their stellar activity can mimic radial velocity signals. So you might think you’re looking at a planet, but you’re actually just looking at a star being really active … which means that we can’t get radial velocities from kind of really small planets because they’re not causing a big enough wobble in their stars spectra.
So we’re trying to find ways to mitigate this, but as our technology gets better and our techniques get better, I’m sure it will.
We use a lot of statistical processes like Gaussian processes, to try and mitigate this stellar activity now. But those are kind of the two main areas that I’m really excited about … and techniques.
Brendan: Very exciting. Okay, let’s do Exoplanets 101 for our new listeners. I did a search on the ArXiv server and found … heh … over 8 ,000 papers on exoplanet research, and there are scores of telescopes and instruments. You’ve mentioned some of them, both Earth based and space -based, and they’re being utilized to make all these beautiful discoveries of exoplanets,
but … we have previously interviewed scientists that have worked on the famous Trappist System and others who have used Kepler, TESS, you’ve mentioned Spitzer, Chandra, and the JWST, obviously in their research, but I saw in your Gliese 12b paper that you primarily used data from the recently launched CHEOPS Space Telescope and the ground-based HARPS North Spectrograph on the Galileo Telescope in the Canary Islands. These two instruments look amazing. Could you I ntroduce our listeners to CHEOPS and HARPS North please?
Larissa: Yeah, so I’ll start with CHEOPS.
Essentially, that is a European Space Agency telescope, and it’s in orbit around the earth, and it’s actually the first space mission dedicated to studying bright nearby stars that are already known to host exoplanets.
So what happens a lot of the time is that big kind of surveys like TESS will identify planet candidates, but actually if it’s kind of a long period planet, then you might only get one transit, or if there’s transits that you think fall in data gaps … you also might not really get that many transits in orbit. And really to get kind of a precise radius, you really need more than one transit.
So what happens is that you use CHEOPS and then rather than staring at a patch of sky like TESS does … an the length that TESS will stare at a patch of sky is only 28 days -ish … so if you have a planet that is orbiting a star in 50 days then you might not get any transits or you’ll just get one.
And that’s why missions like CHEOPS are very important.
But CHEOPS will then stare at the star specifically. You have to give them quite precise windows on when you think transit’s going to occur. And also it’s kind of a very high-precision telescope, so you’ll get quite good data from the transit. And that’s, yeah, a really exciting telescope to use. I’ve used it on a couple papers now, and the data you get from it is always very good.
And then HARPS-North is a ground -based spectrograph.
It’s in La Palma in the Canary Islands. And this is the main radial velocity telescope that my team uses.
I’m part of the HARPS North Guaranteed Time Observations team.
And, yeah, it’s a radial velocity telescope. So it’s looking for those little wobbles in a star’s spectra to be able to work out a planet’s mass. And we used some of the spectra in our paper just to verify that it was actually a planet we were looking at.
We weren’t able to characterize its mass because I think we only used 13 observations. But my team is still looking at Gliese 12b with the HARPS-North spectrograph.
You can only get one observation per night, and not every night is great because it’s obviously on the ground. It’s not in orbit around the planet. So it takes time to get a lot of radial velocity observations … and then the star won’t always be visible … sometimes it will set … but yeah hopefully we’ll be able to come out with a mass in the next year and then from the radius from my team … the paper that was just published on Gliese 12b and from the mass we’ll be able to tell the density of the planet and then be able to work out a lot more about its interior structure … so yeah … two very exciting instruments!
Brendan: Fantastic. Okay. Now we can look at your Gliese 12b paper in Monthly Notices.
The response has been fast and furious … in a very good way. Previously we’ve done interviews about the SETI program and Breakthrough Listen, where there are very active research programs into technosignatures and biosignatures.
Are you looking specifically for Earth 2 .0?
Larissa: So, no, unfortunately not. Haha … I am looking for planets around that size though. And if I accidentally stumble upon it, I won’t be mad. But yeah, I’m more looking at how planets develop around the small size range, so below 4 Earth radii … and what that can teach us about more all the planets in our solar system, which have a range of sizes. … I’m very excited to see what the teams that are working on it will bring us in the coming decades.
We’re really going to have a breakthrough soon hopefully!
But yeah … I’m excited that I can at least contribute to what they’re doing in terms of Gliese 12B. But, yeah, unfortunately, not specifically, but who knows, maybe I’ll stumble upon it.
Brendan: Yeah … it’s very much a golden era of astrophysics. Okay. Now, we know very well that research doesn’t always sail smoothly, and we’re very happy to put our propeller heads on for a little while.
Could you share with us some of the details of a particular part of your exoplanet research that you’re working on right now that is driving you crazy or is astonishingly exciting?
What’s going on, Larissa?
Larissa: So right now I’m actually working on a reanalysis survey. So I’m looking at seven planets across five planetary systems that already have published masses and radii out there.
But I have new data from CHEOPS and HARPS-North actually … that I am hoping to incorporate into data that is already published and try to get a more precise mass and radius than we already have … to ultimately aim to improve the bulk density of these planets so again we can work out more about their internal composition … so it’s been very frustrating because I kind of know what the radius is meant to be of the planet. So if I know it’s meant to be two earth radii and I have like a statistical simulation that spits out 39 Earth radii, I know that I’m definitely on the wrong track.
And that keeps happening and it’s the most frustrating part about this research can sometimes be the data decorrelation … kind of removing all the spikes and aspects that are just kind of stellar activity, or something else that’s going on … and so right now I’m dealing with that and it’s going … Slowly! Ha! But I’ll get there in the end It’s all about perseverance!
Fingers crossed I’ll fix it soon!
Brendan:
Heh! I’m sure you’ll get there in the end …. Thanks you … ummm , and what about the nature of your non-research work at Edinburgh?
I see you have been teaching undergrads there since 2021 … at the height of COVID … we might talk about that later …
Are you also lecturing and mentoring at Edinburgh?
Larissa: Yeah, so I’m a teaching assistant and a supervisor on some modules, so … there’s none going on right now. But during term time, I just help in coding workshops.
But one of the more exciting modules that I’m supervising is an outreach and engagement for physicists and geoscientists module in which the undergrads have to design an outreach project from scratch, and deliver it to the audience they’re aiming for … and that’s really exciting to see a project built from the ground up… most recently I had a girl this year who designed an escape room so young kids could learn more about Scottish female physicists.
Brendan: HaHeh!
Larissa: Yeah! It was a really neat idea, and it was really exciting to see it come to life and she did a fantastic job!
And then last year there was a boy who built a website … which I think might still be up … it’s called “Running out of Space” … which tracked live satellite data … and you went on the website and it worked out your location … asked for your location and then it told you the amount of space debris that was above head at that moment. … and how many kilograms.
And the aim was to raise awareness about space debris and how we need to kind of regulate what satellites are sent up … because right now there’s not really big agreement in the international community. But yeah, I love kind of supervising that module especially.
But yeah, so I do a bit of kind of teaching and mentoring.
Brendan: Well, that sounds like both fun and very useful. We’ll have a look at that website. Okay, let’s talk about COVID … I see you were studying at Cambridge and the University of Nottingham and you’ve got your association with UCL and you were doing most of your studies there during the height of a COVID pandemic.
Now, how did COVID affect you and your family and what was the impact on your astrophysics research and were there lessons learnt Larissa?
Larissa: Yeah, so I was an undergrad in 2020. I was in my third year, and I still had a year left at Nottingham. So it was kind of quite … abrupt … in that everyone went home in March, and a lot of people graduate in their third year in the UK but I was doing an integrated Masters, so Masters was included in my degree. So mine was four years. But it kind of meant that we returned -ish in September, and people had just gone. This appeared, you never got to say goodbye to them. They’d graduated. They were getting on with their lives.
And it was quite sad. And then actually that summer as well, I did an internship at the University of Cambridge, but because of COVID, it was all remote.
And that was kind of sad as well, because I think internships … as well as learning a load of skills, and they kind of give you an opportunity to network with people in the field which I didn’t really get to do because it was kind of over Zoom but it’s always a bit awkward over Zoom … haha… especially when this is kind of your first step into that kind of world, but I think it taught perseverance anyway and COVID especially … it allowed me the time to be able to kind of write all these PhD applications whilst I was still studying. Because there wasn’t a whole lot else going on … and it also meant that when I was doing the internship, even though it was online, I kind of focused a lot harder on the research aspect of it, rather than trying to kind of deal with kind of social events which I might have had if I was in Cambridge as well, because I was just at my family home … and I think that kind of raised my love for that kind of research because I really enjoyed it, despite the fact that everything was going on in the world, and no one was leaving the house.
But yeah, no, I really enjoyed the research. And I also learned how to code with Python as well, because I’d never done that before. I didn’t learn that in my undergrad degree. But yeah, I think it was a hard time and I’m glad we’re through the other side.
And I think kind of collaborative research is slowly returning to what it probably used to be pre -pandemic. But I also think kind of COVID brought about kind of homeworking and online working a lot more, which is kind of definitely a great aspect because it allowed me to kind of collaborate with Shishir in Australia.
Obviously, Zoom wasn’t really a thing pre -pandemic, so I don’t know how … heh … how we would have ended up working with each other.
But yeah, there were lessons learned, I think, in kind of that aspect.
Brendan: That’s great, Larissa. Thank you. Now, what about outreach? Do you have any in the pipeline?
Is outreach an important part of being an astrophysicist?
Larissa: Yes, I think it’s, in my opinion, it’s kind of the most important part. There’s no point doing the research if you’ve got no one to tell about it.
And so kind of my next major piece of outreach, I guess I’m doing a talk at an astronomy club, kind of in a local astronomy club in Edinburgh in a few months. And then I was also invited to be part of a panel and give a talk as part of the first undergraduate symposium for black physicists … which is happening in September which unfortunately I cant attend because I’m away … but I was going to be talking about whether you should do a PhD … because it’s not currently the most accessible area to ethnic minorities … but being able to … kind of … communicate to an audience about how I reached the position … and where I am, because it was a lot of hard work, and also partly luck, but also mentorship as well, so to be able to give back … is especially important to me … the next piece of outreach is just a public talk, but I’m always open to more and more opportunities… I think it’s one of the best parts of the job … as well … seeing people get excited about the science that you’ve put months and months of work into … and how it can ultimately maybe inspire them, and especially the young children … it’s very exciting!
Brendan: Yeah, I can see you inspiring a lot of people Larissa … now … OK … now … the microphone is all yours and you have 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, or in science denialism, my bugbear, or science career paths, or your own passion for research … or that huge human quest for new knowledge, the microphone, Larissa, is all yours.
Larissa: Thank you. So actually I’m going to talk about something that’s been talked about a lot, and that is climate change. Essentially, I obviously spend in my life right now as looking at exoplanets, but actually that means nothing if we ruin the planet that we’re on.
And the more and more we learn about the universe and all these different types of alien worlds out there, the more it makes Earth look even more special, that humanity has been able to develop where we are now.
So the fact that we treat Earth this way … is … really annoying … if anything, but also the fact that people try to deny that it’s happening, when scientists have been … showing, and predicting what is going to happen for ages … but also the very human consequences that people are living with right now in terms of change of weather and loss of habitable areas.
So yeah, that really infuriates me … especially that the governments are being very slow to act on it when we don’t really have that much time and it’s all good and well being worried about things like the economy and healthcare like those are very important.
But ultimately, if we let this problem get a lot worse, those things will also mean nothing. We need to stop it in its tracks before it gets to the point of no return, which it is very nearly reaching.
So it just makes me really sad … to kind of spend all my time studying these amazing worlds and be living on one right now that is not treated with the care that it justly deserves.
Brendan: Yeah, we really need to lift our game. Yeah, I live in a small farm in the middle of nowhere in regional Australia and I see climate change in every season each year.
Okay. Now, is there anything else we should watch out for in the near future? What are you keeping your eye on?
Larissa: K218B … haha … A hot topic on a lot of people’s lips because of the work with JWST that is being done on it.
I’m not specifically working on it, but I hear about it a lot of conferences that they may or may not have discovered dimethyl sulphate in its atmosphere, which on earth is only produced by living organisms, but if you introduce an offset, the detection disappears, but they’ve also discovered a lot of other exciting gases.
So I don’t think there’s been any kind of massive publications about it yet, but that’s a very exciting candidate, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they end up kind of saying about it.
Yeah … it’s a very hot topic in exoplanet science right now … but also all the science that is going to come out of JWST, I think is one to watch as well.
Brendan: Exciting! Fantastic! Thank you so much … all right … Larissa Palethorpe, on behalf of all of our listeners and especially from me, it’s been really exciting to be speaking with you over there in Edinburgh, one of my favourite cities. And, thank you especially for your time in your gruelling PhD schedule and the pressures to meet all your publication deadlines and getting all your data down on time.
I’m certain those deadlines are breathing down your neck and good luck with all your next adventures and all your future travels and may your career continue to be out of this world.
Thanks, Larissa.
Larissa: Thank you very much, Brendan. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for allowing me to talk about all the research. I hope everyone enjoyed it.
Brendan: Bye now.
Larissa : Bye. Thank you.
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. Keep looking up.
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