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Ever wonder why that stunning “naked eye” aurora looked like a faint white glow to your family, or why the massive ‘dancing’ Mother’s Day solar storm of May 2024 lit up the internet and the night sky in such unexpected ways? Both the Northern Lights and Aurora Australis were glorious! In this episode of Astrophiz, we go behind the lens and into the science with Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach, a specialist in space plasma physics and auroral researcher at Lancaster University, to uncover the science of the auroral oval and the secrets of the colors we see—from dominant oxygen green to rare nitrogen-induced magenta curtains. As we move over the peak of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, Dr. Walach explains the vital role of magnetometers in forecasting and why your smartphone camera often “sees” more than the human eye.Beyond the visual spectacle, we explore the cutting-edge future of space weather tracking, including the upcoming SMILE mission (Solar Wind Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer). This joint ESA and Chinese Academy of Sciences project is set to provide the first global X-ray images of Earth’s magnetosphere boundaries since 2005.
Beyond the visual spectacle, we explore the cutting-edge future of space weather tracking, including the upcoming SMILE mission (Solar Wind Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer). This joint ESA and Chinese Academy of Sciences project is set to provide the first global X-ray images of Earth’s magnetosphere boundaries since 2005.
From the forensics of geomagnetic storms to the latest in upper atmosphere research, Dr. Walach reveals the mechanics behind these celestial fireworks. Whether you call them the Northern Lights, the Aurora Australis, or just a good reason to lose some sleep, this conversation is essential listening for anyone who looks at the night sky and asks “Why?” or “How?”
About my Guest: Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach is a leading researcher specializing in Space Physics and the Earth’s Ionosphere. Her work is vital for understanding the Sun-Earth connection and protecting our planetary infrastructure.
Transcript: Aurora Secrets with Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach
Brendan: Welcome to Astrophiz. I’m Brendan O’Brien and we acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and their ancient astronomical heritage. Join us as we fight for a greener future and sit down with the world’s leading space scientists to see how our universe works. And right now we’re zooming over 11 time zones to speak with a brilliant solar wind and aurora astrophysicist, Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach.
Hello, Maria-Theresia.
Maria-Theresia: Hi, Brendan.
Brendan: Today, listeners, we’re really excited to be speaking with Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach in Lancaster, UK, who’s a fabulous aurora researcher and lecturer in space plasma physics. Maria-Theresia is the course lead for the Space and Auroral Physics course at Lancaster University in the UK. She is the Ernest Rutherford Fellow at Lancaster and has won a huge array of awards and prizes for her research. She is a reviewer for Nature Astronomy.
She is an invited presenter at many international research conferences. She’s just come back from a huge conference in China. She’s a master’s and PhD examiner, both on the local and international stages. And she’s the lead coordinator and organizer of a fascinating range of research projects into auroral physics. On top of that, she does beautiful outreach on many media platforms. So we are very privileged to have her here right now, and especially from me: Thanks for speaking with us today, Maria-Theresia.
Maria-Theresia: Thanks for having me, Brendan. It’s really exciting to be here and to be able to talk a little bit with you about my work today.
Brendan: Okay, thanks. Now, before we talk about your current Aurora work as a principal investigator in space plasma research, can you first tell us where you grew up, please, Maria-Theresia? And could you tell us how you first became interested in science and space?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, happy to. So I grew up in Switzerland in a town called Basel. It’s a very beautiful city by a river. And I actually had very little interest in space when I was growing up there. That came much later in my life than my interest in space physics, really. Back in the day, I was studying a lot of languages at school and I didn’t have much to do with physics, actually. That came much later.
Yeah, so my journey was an interesting one into space physics because I didn’t have the typical interest in space from a young age. I grew up just doing all sorts of different things and different hobbies. And when I was a teenager, my parents moved to the UK. I don’t know if you know much about the UK school system, but in the UK, you have to pick your A-levels, we call it. So it’s your kind of your final school subjects and you have to pick a number of them.
So I was made to pick something on the spot and I didn’t know what to pick. And at the time, my teacher said, “What do you want to do when you’re older?” And I said, “Maybe architecture.” And she said, “Oh, maybe physics is a good one then.” So I picked physics based on that. And we went from there, really.
Brendan: OK, thank you. Well, after your successful school career at the University of Leicester, you were first awarded your combined bachelor’s and master’s degree at Leicester for your work on auroral substorms. Then you stayed on there for your research on auroras and magnetosphere research. Then you stayed on for your PhD and postdoc work.
Now, for our early career researchers and undergrads listening, could you tell us how you arranged it and why you made that move from your master’s to such an arduous PhD where you focused on solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Leicester. And then I was doing my master’s project on the auroras. And I really enjoyed it. Really, really enjoyed it. And I was looking at this data set from a spacecraft called IMAGE, and it was literally taking images of the auroral oval from space.
And I had so many questions left. You know, I was analyzing this data set for my master’s project, and I didn’t really know what to do after my degree finished. So I went up to my PhD supervisor and said, “Is there any way I can continue this work?” And he said, “Yeah, actually, I might have a PhD project going and maybe we can sort something out.” So it kind of happened by accident, really. I hadn’t really planned it. It just sort of went from one into the other.
Brendan: Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Thank you, Maria-Theresia. Well, having such an avid curiosity about the Sun’s mysteries and learning new things every day—the plan for today is to very briefly revisit some of your earlier research to understand some of the basic terms used by auroral and solar wind researchers.
Then perhaps you can tell us about some of your favorite instruments and spacecraft that can be used to forecast and predict those dazzling, beautiful auroras that have captured the public’s fascination over the last few years as we pass through the peak of the Sun’s 11-year cycle. Now, I might also have some other questions later, but for now, how does that sound as a plan, Maria-Theresia?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, great.
Brendan: Okay. Now, let’s have a quick look at your PhD research to help us understand your personal research trajectory. Your PhD thesis focused on ionospheric convection and auroral responses to solar wind driving. Now, I’m not going to ask you to define those three terms, but we may put our science hats on a bit later. In the meantime, can you tell us in general, what problems are you working on that you have to overcome?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, this is an interesting one. So some of the biggest challenges I think we face right now are actually to do with data. So we live in the age of Big Data. And as you can imagine, some of the instruments that have been collecting data since, say, the early 90s at, say, a minute cadence, they are going to be blowing up into the regime of terabytes.
And that’s totally okay if you’re working with one or two data sets at a time, because you can just put them on a hard drive or your computer. But some of my research interests can only really be answered by stitching together large data sets and looking at them, you know, on a statistical basis. And that’s a huge challenge, especially since we’re building instrumentation right now that is capable of higher cadence and higher resolution measurements than ever.
So kind of combining those large scale views of, say, the Aurora, but not just the Aurora, other parts of space as well. And the sort of smaller scale dynamics is a huge challenge. And sort of stitching that together and managing the data is actually a huge part of the challenge that, you know, this is not something that we conventionally teach our undergraduate students or even our master’s or PhD students. So when you come to tackle that, that’s actually an interdisciplinary challenge that most physicists are not necessarily very prepared for. So it’s a big one. Phew.
Brendan: Okay. Thank you, Maria-Theresia. Now, what are your favourite instruments and what are the favourite spacecraft that can be used to forecast and predict space weather and understand the causes of those dazzling auroras? What are your favourites?
Maria-Theresia: Oh, right. So this is actually a list, so I don’t have just one favourite. So if I may, I’m going to list a few. So to start with, I think one of the key things that we need are measurements of the solar wind. So this is stuff coming from the Sun and it interacts with our magnetic environment. And that’s how we get the aurora.
And so in order to know how that’s going to change across time and what’s coming next, we need to look at the solar wind. So we do that by putting spacecraft in front of the Earth, if you will, sort of between the Earth and the Sun. And that tells us what’s going to happen next.
Then one of the things that I really like are ground-based instrumentation, mostly because they are quite fairly cheap to build and run. So there’s lots of them and they’ve been going for a long time. So to predict and understand the aurora, we often use something called a magnetometer. That tells you how things are changing in the magnetic environment on Earth. And then, of course, there are the auroral cameras that we have, either on the ground or we’ve had some in space before. There are fewer of them in space right now, but hopefully that will change in the future.
Brendan: Beautiful. Okay. Well, that has brought us up to date. Now, can we have a look at the work that you’re doing to understand the impact of a Sun’s behaviour on our planet? What’s exciting for solar wind and aurora research scientists right now?
Maria-Theresia: Right, yeah, so I mentioned that we might have some more overall cameras soon in space. There is an upcoming mission called the SMILE mission. That’s the Solar Wind Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer mission. And that’s a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This spacecraft will be launched later this year, hopefully in April. It’s being fueled right now, actually, and getting ready for launch, being checked and everything, and sort of having its health check done, if you will. And this spacecraft will have an auroral imager that will look at the entire auroral oval from space. And it’s the first time we’ll be able to see those views again since 2005 when IMAGE, the spacecraft I mentioned earlier that I used for my undergraduate degree and my PhD, died.
So I’m really excited for SMILE. That’s not the only reason to be excited about SMILE. SMILE also has an X-ray camera that will look at X-ray emission in Earth’s magnetosphere for the first time. That’s never been done before in this way. And so we’ll be able to image the boundary of the magnetosphere, hopefully with that instrument. And that’s incredibly exciting.
Brendan: Fantastic. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that upcoming spacecraft and perhaps even the launch. OK, let’s do Aurora Science 101. In a previous interview we got to understand that the Sun hurls out solar flares that can reach Earth in eight minutes and CMEs or coronal mass ejections that can reach Earth in about 15 to 18 hours.
Now, can you tell us about the solar wind and the magnetosphere and how and why auroras are actually produced? Please, Maria-Theresia.
Maria-Theresia: Yeah. So in order to get the aurora in our atmosphere, what we need are a few things. So we need to have plasma in space. And that’s something you can’t see, but it’s everywhere in space. I don’t know how much your previous episodes have covered this. But just in a nutshell, plasma is the fourth state of matter.
So if you think about what we have on Earth, we’ve got solids. So, for example, ice is a solid. Then we have water; it’s a liquid. And then you have gas. You put your water in your kettle, you boil it, you get a gas. Now, with a plasma, that’s even more energized than a gas normally. So you have essentially you’re energizing your gas. So you’re separating your electrons and your ions from each other. So you have those two moving independently. And that’s important because this is what we have everywhere in space, including Earth’s magnetosphere.
And it’s also what the solar wind carries with it. And when we have a magnetic field, the magnetic field guides how the plasma moves around space. And this plasma can be accelerated along Earth’s magnetic field lines. And when it hits the atmosphere at just the right angle, it can give us some of that energy to the neutral atmosphere. So our gas that we have surrounding the Earth and that we all love to breathe.
And when you have this gas being energized, the gas particles start to move around and they can essentially relax back down into their neutral state by giving off this energy in terms of light. And that’s how the aurora is formed, really. The light is formed by the neutral particles in the atmosphere and they are energized by the plasma particles from space.
So what the wind does, it interacts with the Earth’s magnetic environment and that can change the shape, the form, the energy, the location of the aurora. And those are ways that through the magnetic field interacting with the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field that can shape that. And in time, that changes all the time. To some extent, quite complex because we can’t all predict it just yet.
Brendan: Beautiful. OK, thanks, Maria-Theresia. Now, let’s drill down a bit further. You mentioned the light. Can we look at why most auroras are observed as green or red and some can even be purple or yellow or blue? What’s with all the different colours?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so I mentioned the neutral atmosphere. Obviously, our atmosphere is mostly made up of hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen down on Earth. But what happens in the upper atmosphere is you have different amounts of these constituents of the neutral atoms in the atmosphere. And depending how they’re energised and when they’re energised, they give off different lights.
So, for example, green aurora is the most dominant by far, and that’s given off by oxygen. That happens around below 200 kilometres or so. And that’s by far the most dominant emission that we get because there is lots of oxygen there. Then we also have red that also can come from the oxygen, actually. And that tends to be at a higher altitude. So that’s around above 200 kilometers or so, I’d say. So if the oxygen above 200 kilometers is energized enough, it gives off red light.
And then we have more blue and violet hues that come from the nitrogen at lower altitudes again. Then also the very lower altitudes you sometimes get these sort of curtains, these different sort of stripy auroras with the bottom edge being a little bit pinkish or magenta colored, and that can also be from the nitrogen. So these kind of auroras happen when you have plasma particles essentially raining down onto the atmosphere in very discreet ways, so very accelerated and very direct, and that energizes the neutral atmosphere.
Then we also have a more sort of steady diffuse glow, we call it the diffuse aurora, and that tends to be more pinkish red on the southern horizon of the main auroral oval, and that’s from plasma that is sort of slowly precipitating into the atmosphere at a sort of steady level from the night side of the Earth.
And then the thing you can’t see, but that I really love to study, is the UV aurora. So that’s ultraviolet light. Obviously, our eyes are not tuned to see that at all. And you also have the atmosphere screening that light out. So the UV aurora you can only see from space. But it’s a great way to tell where the energy is being injected into the atmosphere.
Brendan: Beautiful. Thank you very much. I just saw a very—or there’s so many Aurora photos on the internet.
Maria-Theresia: Oh, yeah. And a lot of them you can tell that they’ve been manipulated by Photoshop.
Brendan: I saw one with some really strong yellows in it. Is yellow a thing?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so you do get some yellows. I think yellow per se as the main emission doesn’t really happen, but you can sort of see the green as a little bit of yellow coming up sometimes. And if the green mixes with the red, it can look yellow. So there are various ways that it can sort of turn into yellow. But you have to be really careful with what you see on the internet because so much of it is absolutely photoshopped.
Brendan: Exactly. Okay. Thank you, Maria-Theresia. That is excellent. Now, the Mother’s Day solar storm, May 2024. Not only did the sky light up, but so did the internet. And we have a huge interest in auroras in both hemispheres. And many more people are keen to observe and share their images. But we also have some disappointments. I’ve heard stories of people seeing some stunning aurora photos on social media, almost in real time and in their exact location. They’ve woken up the kids, rushed the whole family outside and nothing. It’s just a faint white glow. Could you tell us why some auroras are beautiful naked eye events and some will only be visible through a camera or a smartphone?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, that’s a really common story, actually. I’ve heard this quite a lot. People spend a lot of money on expensive holidays to go see the Aurora and then they come back disappointed, right? That happens. And it’s definitely something to be aware of that it can happen to you.
So what I would say is this comes down to biology, actually. So we have in our eyes, we have what’s known as cones and rods. And as far as I know—my biology knowledge is actually very limited—but as far as I know they are not tuned to looking at things when it’s dark for a start. So you’re not very good at looking at things in the dark. So your smartphone camera is much more optimized to picking up lights in the dark, mostly because most smartphone cameras actually now have more than one camera and they do a lot of post-processing already internally before you even see the picture.
So there is some stuff going on behind the scenes that makes it look great every time. And that really helps. So some smartphone cameras are better than others for this. But yeah, our eyes are just not really tuned to it. So what I would say is: be patient, bring your phone, and also check the weather. The amount of people that I know who’ve gone out to try and go aurora hunting just to be disappointed by clouds is unbelievable.
Brendan: Exactly. Okay. Thank you, Maria-Theresia. And now, that is a nice segue to this question. We know very well that science doesn’t always sail smoothly and we’re really happy to put our propeller heads on for a short time. You work on a number of international collaborations on solar wind and space weather. Could you share with us some details of a particular part of your research that you’re working on right now that’s driving you crazy or is astonishingly exciting, or perhaps it’s even both?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, I’m actually stuck right now. I do get stuck a lot, actually. This is a really big part of being a scientist, is getting stuck and then getting unstuck. And I love the process, but I’d solve a lot of those problems by talking to some of my collaborators and really thinking things through. So that’s something that the training of doing a PhD really teaches you and that helps.
So at the moment one of the things I’ve been looking at recently is the boundaries of things in space and the aurora as well and how they match. And so there’s this boundary of the aurora where it happens and how that maps into space. And the truth is this boundary doesn’t always map to where we think it should. So there’s a recent finding of mine that’s been perplexing me a little.
I was looking at geomagnetic storms, which are these very busy and crazy events in our magnetosphere where maybe they’re driven by something like a CME or something similar, where you have a lot of aurora happening and the whole aurora oval moves to lower latitudes. And then various processes happen in the magnetosphere and things start to reconfigure themselves. So the whole magnetic environment of the Earth changes.
And one of the things that I found was that this lower latitude boundary of where we think the aurora should be doesn’t always match with where things in space are and where we think it should map to. So this is a little bit perplexing. And I’m certain that it’s a true phenomenon, but explaining the physics of it becomes incredibly tricky very quickly. And you need to look at lots of different data sets in different places, different spacecraft to understand what’s going on.
I’m hoping that when we get new data from the SMILE spacecraft, we can figure this out in a little bit more detail. At the moment it’s a new finding and I’m hoping that we can figure it out in more detail soon of what’s going on. But it’s important to also maybe mention at this point atmospheric interactions. So we like to think of things in sort of silos, because it’s easier to think about one thing rather than a whole process of things, a whole chain of processes. But we have to remember that everything in space is tied to the atmosphere. And so there is some coupling between the two. And that’s where things get really interesting, but also really complex.
Brendan: OK, thank you. That sounds both beautiful and mysterious. Now, what about the nature of your non-research work? Do you have other responsibilities at Lancaster University where you’re the space and auroral physics lecturer and the course lead?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so like you just said, I lead the course on space and auroral physics and it’s a third year course at Lancaster University. It’s part of the normal physics degree, but it’s also an optional course. So unless you’re doing astrophysics, it’s optional at the moment. Yeah, that course is really, really fun to teach. It’s usually fairly—it’s a small to medium sized course.
And we go through things like: Why does the Aurora happen? Why did you get different colours at different altitudes? So this is something that my students have to revise for right now because they have an exam coming up. So one of my duties as course lead is to mark the exam, set the exam. I do the lecturing, but we also have these worksheets that we do at Lancaster University where the students, as they go through a course, they will do some problem solving and it helps them prepare for the exam actually. But those are things that I also have to set and mark and help the students with. So there’s some teaching duties there. I also supervise some PhD students, so that keeps me nice and busy. And yeah, so those are my main duties. But then there’s also some smaller admin roles and things to do. There’s always stuff to do. It’s always quite varied and good fun.
Brendan: Indeed. Thank you very much. I can’t even understand how busy you must be. Now, what about AI? We know that AI is impacting the astronomy workspace and pretty much everyone other one. What are you seeing with AI in your area of study?
Maria-Theresia: Sure, yeah, I mean this is an interesting one because the AI world moves incredibly quickly. So there’s a limited amount I can say without it going out of date by tomorrow. But what I will say is that yeah, not only does it move incredibly quickly and research moves incredibly slowly in comparison at universities. So there’s, you know, a little bit of an interesting juxtaposition there in that new research is coming out of AI all the time.
And there’s some really interesting methods that we can learn from and use, actually. I mentioned Big Data earlier, but yeah, so utilizing this data in a sensible way—some of those methods can really help, for example. And that’s really interesting for us. I think it’s a really exciting time. You also have to be careful because I think at the same time, you can overuse those things and you can sort of end up creating lots of research outputs very quickly that are not necessarily useful or as interesting as you might think they are.
So what we’re seeing at the moment, for example, is there are papers being published and produced at an increasing rate. And I think some of that has to do with some of those AI tools becoming widely available and people using it for their research. And that can be a good thing, but it can also be a challenge, especially since every research paper that is being published needs to be reviewed by humans. And that takes time and there’s a limited amount of us and there’s a limited amount of our time that we can spend on this as well. That’s a challenge, I think, for journals and editors as well.
And then the other challenge that I’m seeing with that is at universities, we’re having this discussion of: How do we make sure we’re still examining the students in an appropriate way with all these AI tools being out there? So, for example, LLMs—if you’re getting students to write an essay, how do you mark that accordingly, right? So that’s a big challenge. And a big discussion happening at all universities right now, I’m sure.
Brendan: Exactly. It’s a huge challenge. And that road from data to information to knowledge to wisdom, it’s not necessarily a straight line. Now, back to your research work—sorry. Obviously, you’re also immersed in solving some of the most complex and puzzling phenomena where the Sun interacts with our planet, as you’ve just described. How do you do your best thinking? What circumstances do you usually need to swim clearly through that huge sea of data you just mentioned and come up with verifiable conclusions? What situations and surroundings do you use to support your best thinking?
Maria-Theresia: That’s a really, really good question, Brendan. So, yeah, I mean, everyone’s different in that respect, right? But for me, I personally like really long periods of quiet and silence to really think things through. And actually, I think some of my best writing work has come out of those long times of not having to interact with anyone. I do like just going for long walks as well. That really helps me. And doing some sports and exercise really helps me clear my head as well.
So I think it’s important to have a bit of a balance though. I also really enjoy talking to people about my work and I really enjoy working with collaborators and meeting up with people to talk about the research that we’re doing. So conferences lend themselves really, really well for that. And I often come away with lots of ideas and lots of enthusiasm, which I then somehow have to channel into the work.
So that’s where then the periods of quiet time come in. And so, for example, the pandemic for me worked really, really well. And I’m a little bit ashamed to say it because I know it was a terrible time for many people. But for me, having lots of quiet time really, really helped. And having that time of just, yeah, almost enforced silence was actually a really good thing for my brain.
Brendan: Okay, thanks, Maria-Theresia. You’ve painted the big picture of auroras. We’ve looked at your early research and your most current work, and we’ve gone all sciencey just for a little while. Now, I know you were a competitive fencer in the past. Would you like to tell us about some of the things outside your research that now regularly brings you great joy?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good one. Yeah, I used to fence and I loved it. This is another challenge and, you know, change that the pandemic brought with it, really. I used to do fencing competitively very regularly and I used to train very hard for it. And then I had this recurring sort of injury that just wouldn’t go away. And the pandemic lent itself really well for having a pause from it, an enforced pause, if you will. That made me realize that there’s maybe other things that I can do with my time and that bring me joy.
So I’ve started doing a lot of gardening during that time, which I continue to do. Some of that is community gardening as well, so sort of with other people locally. And also doing other sports. So, for example, I now go for more walks than I used to. And I definitely have done more running as well, although I would call myself an aspirational runner. I like to run, but I don’t do it as much as I think I do.
But yeah, lots of other things as well, sort of that I tend to do more on my own, but also with other people. So I like to play the violin, for example, which is something I also didn’t used to have time for, but now I make a little bit more time for it. And I do a bit of sewing. So sometimes I will make clothes and I will sometimes even wear them to work.
Brendan: Excellent. Okay. Look, let’s get back to your research for a minute. What is a result or finding from your work that genuinely surprised you?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, good question. One thing that keeps surprising me and has surprised me in the past is how tightly coupled different layers of the atmosphere and the ionosphere and space are. So there’s a tendency even amongst some of the most esteemed scientists to treat the ionosphere and thermosphere—so these are the sort of upper layers of the atmosphere—as somewhat separate systems because the ionosphere is ionized. So this is where we have plasma reigning supreme, if you will. And then in the thermosphere, we have neutrals—so the neutral molecules being the most dominant part.
And so people have for a really long time treated these as very separate systems. But when you actually start modeling them together and look at what happens during a geomagnetic storm, the energy pathways are far more interconnected than the textbooks suggest. And there are lots of time-dependent complex phenomena that are difficult to model, difficult to observe for various reasons. For example, the thermosphere, you can’t just send a spacecraft up there and keep it for a long time. It’s low enough that gravity will wreak havoc with your spacecraft. So it’s difficult to observe that region of space. So we don’t have lots of observations.
And understanding what’s going on there is really tricky. So we have this thing called Joule heating, for example, which means that the atmosphere is heated by energy coming from space. So the plasma in space that is moving around is imparting energy onto the neutral atmosphere and it heats the atmosphere actually. And this is one of the key space weather effects that we regularly observe, but modeling it is incredibly tricky because you have these different parts working together.
So it doesn’t just warm a local patch of the atmosphere and stop there—what it does is it drives winds in the neutral atmosphere and then redistributes density, for example. It feeds back on the electric currents that were driving it in the first place, so back out into space, for example. And every time I think I understand this, it shows me another loop that I hadn’t accounted for. So there’s lots of different parts of it to understand. And you can think of this as lots of feedback systems that are sort of feeding into each other.
And yeah, recently I published a result that I was talking about earlier—that during geomagnetic storms, the locations of our electrodynamic measurements don’t match in the way they should. And consequently, the aurora as well. And I still don’t fully understand how that works. And I’m still not fully satisfied with the answer that I’ve got. So working with data is an incredibly humbling journey so far, for sure. And we continue to find out more.
Brendan: That sounds like beautiful science. Thank you. Okay, now you’ve done lecturing to undergrads and mentoring and supervision of PhDs and leading research projects. You’ve done fabulous outreach on lots of platforms. I’ve checked out some of your online interviews and your presentations and your videos. Is outreach an important part of being an astrophysicist? And do you have any in the pipeline right now? Thanks.
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so is it an important part? It just depends who you ask. I think people will respond to this very differently. I think it’s an incredibly powerful tool to inspire people and to get more people interested in physics. From my perspective, that’s never a bad thing. I think physics is all around us. And I mean, who’s not curious about how things work, right?
Ultimately, I think there is something very human about wanting to understand how things work and physics can give us some of those answers for sure. Yeah, I hope to inspire many more people with that outreach work. So for me, that’s personally quite important. I get a lot of value from it. And I don’t think you have to do a physics degree to be interested in it. You know, I think that there’s something there for everyone.
…And do I have anything in the pipeline right now? That’s a good question. Yeah, so there are some local things that I think I’m going to do next. This is still very much in the planning phase, so I don’t want to say too much about it, but there are going to be some local events coming up where I’ll be doing some talks and also possibly some work with some local youth groups as well. Stay tuned for more, I would say.
Brendan: Okay, look, let’s drill down to your actual work day. What does a day at work for you look like?
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, so like I said earlier, it can be quite varied. So one thing I like to do is I like to get up quite early and get some of my thinking and writing done in the morning. For me, that’s a very important part of my work day and it’s when I do some of my best work, I’d say.
Then most days at the moment, I will go to work mid-morning and that’s when I have my meetings and teaching, and sort of doing those parts of the job interleaved with research and admin. Yeah, so most of the day I will spend in front of a computer really looking at computer code that I’ve written or that other people have written and trying to use it to understand our data sets and our models and how things work in space. So a lot of it is computer-based, which is why most of my hobbies are away from a screen, just to get that balance in, yeah.
Brendan: Thank you, and getting that balance is always a challenge. Thank you very much, Maria-Theresia. Now, finally, the mic is all yours, and you’ve got the opportunity now to give us your favourite rant or rave about one of the challenges that we face in science, in equity and representations of diversity, or in science denialism—that’s my personal bugbear—or science career paths, or your own passion for research, which is so obvious, or our human quest for new knowledge. The microphone is all yours.
Maria-Theresia: Yeah, I think I have something to say about all of those. Like I said earlier, I think it’s very human to want to understand how things work, and that’s really what motivates me is that curiosity. Tapping into that curiosity and staying curious is a really, really important part of life. And I feel very privileged that I get to do that.
And talking about privilege, I think we can’t talk about privilege without talking about equity and diversity in science. We have to be aware that not everyone takes the same career paths and that we need to make sure that the career paths are open for people from different backgrounds and different demographics. You know, there’s a reason why some demographics have been historically underrepresented in some sciences, and that’s not necessarily to do with their aptitude towards it. So that’s something that I think we can all be aware of.
Within science there are things we can do to help with that as well, and that’s something that I feel very passionate about—to make sure that it is equitable and that there are different career paths for different people and to help early career researchers as well. One of the things that we often talk about are questions and answers, but I think the “questions” part cannot be under-emphasized. So much of science is not about what your next answer is going to be, but what your next question is going to be. Different people have different responses to this, and it’s incredibly important that we don’t have just a dominant voice where we all work on the same thing. I think that’s where some of the best science happens—when we think about the unexpected.
Brendan: Yes, and we do have to nurture that diversity. We can all do a little bit to help there. Okay, look, thank you, Maria-Theresia. Now, before we go, is there anything else we should watch out for in the near future? What are you keeping your eye on?
Maria-Theresia: Oh, I already mentioned it: the SMILE mission. I’m very excited for it. As you mentioned, we’re coming out of this solar cycle, so I think we can probably expect more geomagnetic storms. I think the Sun might hurl out one or two more CMEs at us that are going to cause geomagnetic storms, which for us means auroras that are brighter and happening at lower latitudes—which is very exciting for someone like me who’s living in Lancaster, for example. We only really see the aurora during a geomagnetic storm, so I think that’s something we can keep an eye out for. And then from a science perspective, the SMILE mission is going to be incredibly exciting and that will be launched hopefully in April or May.
Brendan: Fantastic. We’ll look forward to it and we’ll watch out for it with you. Thank you, Dr. Maria-Theresia Walach. On behalf of all of our listeners and especially from me, it’s been really exciting to be speaking with you. (I may edit this out: my daughter’s down in Tasmania, which is closer to Antarctica, and she gets much better auroras than we do!)
Maria-Theresia: Oh, she’s lucky then! That’s brilliant.
Brendan: She is. She sent us some beautiful photos. I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you so much, and good luck with all your next adventures and all your future travels. And thank you for showing us how important curiosity is, and how important diversity is. May your career continue to be a blast. Thank you, Maria-Theresia.
Maria-Theresia: Thanks for having me, Brendan. It’s been really nice chatting with you today, and I hope all the listeners have enjoyed this episode. Have a good night.
Brendan: You too. Bye.
Maria-Theresia: Bye.
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Outro: Thanks for listening. And remember, Astrophiz is free, no ads, and unsponsored. For transcripts and full show notes, visit astrophiz.com. Find us on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite platform. Don’t forget to join us on the first of each month for Dr. Ian Musgrave’s Sky Guide, and the 15th for our next interview. Clear skies. Keep looking up.