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Celebrate groundbreaking astrophysical discoveries with Astrophiz!
In this episode, host Brendan O’Brien sits down with Kovi Rose, a brilliant multi-wavelength astrophysicist at the University of Sydney and the CSIRO, and an outstanding science communicator.
Kovi has led an international team across the globe to discover what researchers are calling a stellar “Rosetta Stone”—a cataclysmic variable star system on the very border of our Milky Way named ASKAP J1745.
Using a powerhouse array of global hardware—including Australia’s ASKAP and ATCA, South Africa’s MeerKAT, and space-based observatories like the Swift XRT and the Einstein Probe—his team has finally cracked the long-standing mystery of Long Period Transients (LPTs).
Discover the mechanics of an extreme, cosmic cannibalistic dance where a dense, Earth-sized white dwarf star uses intense gravity and a magnetic field a million times stronger than a fridge magnet to slowly shred and devour its red dwarf companion.
Plus, hear about Kovi’s personal journey from a humanities background to mastering the heavy machinery of physics, his “accidental data scientist” transition in the AI era, and how he manages a massive research workload—including co-authoring three Nature papers—while running popular science communication projects like Fun Fact Science and the Nerd and the Scientist podcast.
In This Episode: Chapter Index
· Introduction: A stellar milestone and welcoming Kovi Rose.
· The Non-Linear Path: Moving from the humanities to heavy physics machinery.
· Academic Journeys: Transitioning from Jerusalem to the University of Sydney.
· The Power of Mentorship: Standing on the shoulders of Professor Miron Bloch and Professor Tara Murphy.
· Radio Interferometry: How ASKAP casts a massive net across the sky to capture cosmic anomalies.
· Data Sifting & Sunglasses for Telescopes: Using circular polarization filters to cut 3 million sources down to 100.
· The AI Era: Navigating coding optimization as an “accidental data scientist.”
· The Stellar Rosetta Stone: Decoding the 80-minute multi-wavelength pulse of ASKAP J1745.
· Natural Laboratories: Extreme plasma physics, magnetic interactions, and accidental tech spin-offs like Wi-Fi.
· Thesis Final Stretch: Balancing a looming submission with a fourth first-author paper.
· Science Communication: Staying motivated by sharing the joy of physics through Fun Fact Science.
· Brain Hacks: “Productive procrastination” and managing the conditions of your mind.
· Joy & Relaxation: Disconnecting on New Zealand mountaintops and scuba diving.
· The Golden Mic: A final Sagan-inspired call to remember our shared humanity.
Full Transcript: Episode 238 — Kovi Rose: The Rosetta Stone in Space and Decoding Long Period Transients
Introduction
Brendan: Welcome to episode 238 of Astrophiz. I’m Brendan O’Brien and we acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on. This episode is produced on Yorta Yorta, Pangarang and Gadigal country.
Join us as we fight for a greener future as we sit down with the world’s leading space scientists to discover exactly how our universe works. And right now, I’m zooming over to Sydney, Australia, and I’m speaking with Kovi Rose, a fantastic multi-wavelength astrophysicist who has discovered the Rosetta Stone in space, which promises to unlock many more mysteries. Let’s go.
Hello, Kovi.
Kovi: Hey, Brendan. How’s it going?
Brendan: Very well, thank you, Kovi. And hello, listeners. Today, we’re speaking with Kovi Rose, a fantastic multi-wavelength astrophysicist at the University of Sydney and the CSIRO, who is also a brilliant science communicator.
Kovi has made a breakthrough discovery, leading an international team including astronomers from the United States, China, Canada, Spain, Israel and Australia to find the Rosetta Stone in a star system on the very border of our Milky Way.
His team used CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and ASKAP radio telescopes in Australia, the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the SOAR and Magellan optical telescopes in Chile, and the space-based Swift and the recent Einstein Probe telescope to finally crack the mysteries of LPTs—long period transients. They’re strange objects that pulse at many different wavelengths on timescales we can now understand.
And today, we will also hear about his hugely successful science communication projects. As a deep data-diving researcher, he already has three first-author refereed papers and has co-authored nearly 20 refereed publications, including three in Nature. Now, on top of this, he’s finalising his PhD thesis—a gruelling undertaking, we know—and he’s made the time to speak with us.
So thank you, Kovi. It’s a thrill to have you here on the show to hear your stories.
Kovi: Thank you, Brendan, for that glowing introduction. It’s definitely a thrill to be here. And of course, I will always make time for science communication.
As you said, science can be a little bit gruelling at times, and I take a lot of pleasure in being able to share my work with the public and find nice, simple, and accessible ways to communicate all the complexities that our universe has to offer.
Getting Hooked on Physics: A Non-Linear Journey
Brendan: Beautiful. Okay, thanks. We’ll get stuck right into it then, Kovi. So let’s begin. Now, your current research into supernovae and cosmic transients is truly mind-bending. And your SciComm work, as I mentioned, is fabulous.
Over many interviews here, we’ve noticed that the path to the stars is rarely a straight line. For some it is, but looking back at your school days or early at university, how did you first get hooked on astronomy and physics? How did it all begin for you, Kovi?
Kovi: Well, it was definitely not a straight line for me. I was a bit of a rambunctious kid. I had a bit of trouble in school. I think I was very interested in a lot of different things, and I found myself mostly drawn towards the humanities. I liked asking interesting questions and arguing when I didn’t like the answers. So science wasn’t really a key part in my life up until I was an adult.
And I guess the way that I got hooked on science was through astronomy. I found myself standing out in nature in a lovely spot that didn’t have too much light pollution. And I found myself looking out at the stars for the first time in my life, really seeing just the immensity of them. I was drawn to try to figure out what they were and dive into the mysteries of the universe.
The Move from Jerusalem to Sydney
Brendan: Nice. Thank you. Okay, what a beautiful start. So after your school career, university beckoned. How did your ambitions shift as you started mastering the heavy machinery of modern science?
And for our early career researchers and undergrads listening, could you tell us how you arranged it and why you decided to move from Jerusalem to Sydney, Australia to complete your honours bachelor’s degree in science and astrophysics at the University of Sydney and then stay on there for your PhD? How did you do it?
Kovi: Well, in a word, I guess, stubbornness.
When I first started my degree, as you mentioned, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I was looking to do astronomy. Like I said, I fell in love with the romantic side of astronomy, and I rocked up to the university on the first day and they put me into a physics degree.
And I said, “Well, you know, I want to do astronomy and astrophysics. Am I in the right place?” They said, “Listen, we don’t do standalone astronomy degrees here. So if you want astrophysics, you’ve got to go through physics first.”
Heavy machinery is probably a great way to describe it because it was quite heavy for someone coming from a mostly humanities background. During high school and my matriculation in VCE in Melbourne, I didn’t do math, didn’t do science after year 10. So it was a lot of catch up I had to do.
It was a bit of a slog trying to figure out also doing the degree in a different language that wasn’t my native language. It was a slog to kind of go through this heavy machinery to really get familiar with the fundamentals and basics of both mathematics and science. I needed to do astronomy.
And if there are any undergrads listening who feel like they too are struggling, all I can say is just keep pushing through. You can only do your best. You can’t do better. I definitely had a few detractors, some fairly senior members of faculty who said some disparaging things to me along the way. And all I could do is just, you know, keep doing what I wanted to do. I knew what my goal was, and so I pushed through it.
In terms of the move from Jerusalem to Sydney to come back to Australia, I knew what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to do a PhD in astrophysics. And I kind of was a little bit lazy; I thought, “Why am I going to bother wasting, quote-unquote, two years on a master’s degree if I know that I want to do a PhD anyway?”
So I found a researcher here in Australia at the University of Sydney who I had already been working on a research collaboration with on Supernovae, like you mentioned. And I was able to come to Sydney and do an honours year for one year rather than a two-year master’s.
Mentorship: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Brendan: And you’ve done it. Thank you, Kovi. That’s a huge step, and obviously a most successful one. Would you like to tell us about some of the people who have inspired or mentored or supported your amazing science journey?
Kovi: Oh, yeah, that’s a tough one. I think that there are so many people. It would take us at least an hour for me to name each of them and describe the different contexts.
I think one person who was definitely critical was Professor Miron Bloch. He was the physics professor who taught me, well, physics, in the preparatory program I did before starting university in Jerusalem. And keep in mind, this is at a time when I didn’t have a physics background. My math was fairly weak.
He definitely inspired in me this idea of, you know, “trust the equations, push through it.” And one thing I remember he said at the time that I still remember was that his doctoral advisor, I think, was supervised by Albert Einstein. Through that chain, that academic genealogy, he passed on this idea that life is a sine wave. It’s a sine function. It has its ups and it has its downs; you just have to ride it and appreciate both. That was back in Israel.
I think in Australia, I have been incredibly lucky to have a wonderful mentor and supervisor at the University of Sydney, Professor Tara Murphy. Yeah, I’m not sure if you’ve had her on the podcast before.
Brendan: Yep, yeah.
Kovi: Tara helped me really grow into my own as an early career researcher and has been incredibly both inspirational and supportive throughout my entire academic journey, also connecting me to other researchers and other mentors to help me along the way.
Mastering Radio Interferometry with ASKAP
Brendan: Beautiful. It takes more than a village to raise an astrophysicist. Thank you, Kovi.
Look, let’s jump straight into the science and your research. You’re a power user of some of the world’s most impressive hardware, as we heard back in the introduction, and you have a special attachment to the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) out in the remote West Australian scrublands and the ATCA array up in Narrabri. Yeah, I haven’t been to ATCA, ASKAP, or the MWA yet, but I will be getting there one day.
Now, for our listeners who might be new to radio astronomy, what is it about these long period transients that makes them so tricky to find? And why is ASKAP in particular your perfect net to catch them in radio light?
Kovi: Those are a couple of good questions there, Brendan. So I’ll start maybe with the basics for folks who are less familiar with radio astronomy.
Radio astronomy is kind of like regular astronomy, except at a different wavelength, right? There’s the full expansive beauty of the electromagnetic spectrum. And there’s only a very narrow part of that spectrum that we can see with our eyes—it’s what we call visible light. Shorter wavelengths, we have X-ray and ultraviolet. Longer wavelengths, we have infrared and radio.
And a radio telescope, there are a few different ways of building them. One of the most impressive ways that’s quite spectacular, and this is kind of the fundamental way that ASKAP works, is with what’s called interferometry.
The bigger the dish that you have, the better your resolving power. So imagine if you had really, really big eyes, you’d be able to see really, really small, fine details. With radio telescopes, at a certain point, building a bigger and bigger dish becomes somewhat of an engineering problem.
And so what interferometry is, is basically this idea of rather than building a single, big dish, you build a bunch of smaller ones, spread them over a wide area, and digitally connect the signals together. So it’s both cheaper and more efficient, and you don’t upset the engineers.
ASKAP is a really amazing example of radio interferometry. It’s built in Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory out in Western Australia. It’s just this phenomenal beast of a telescope that is able to observe huge chunks of the sky at once.
Rather than looking at the universe through a tiny straw, we basically have a massive field of view that we can see. ASKAP’s field of view at a given time is about 30 square degrees. The moon is about half a degree in size, right? So it’s about 10 times the width of the moon. Imagine if you could build a grid of moons, you’d be able to see a 10 by 10 grid of moons all at once with this one telescope.
Because of that, ASKAP is a really incredible survey instrument. You can cover huge chunks of the sky in a relatively short amount of time. And as a result of that, we are able to detect all the things. We can find detections of known populations like supernovae and stars, and see more of them than we had previously because of this kind of huge bucket of light capturing so much of the sky at once.
And for these long period transients that you mentioned, they’re really tricky to find because their properties are in some ways similar to pulsars, which we can talk about later if you like, but they’re also quite unique in their properties. They’re also not something that we knew about before we had these surveys.
The Murchison Widefield Array (the MWA) and ASKAP combined have discovered the overwhelming majority of these long period transients. I think it’s about nine out of the 13 known LPTs, as we call them, have been discovered here in Australia by the MWA and ASKAP.
And that’s specifically because of these wide fields of view and incredibly sensitive instruments. You’re just kind of able to see all the things that you’re expecting to see, and also, when you cast such a wide net, discover things that you weren’t expecting to find.
Sifting Data: Polarized “Sunglasses” for Telescopes
Brendan: Beautiful. Okay, thank you. Look, that’s a lovely overview of the local hardware we have here.
Now, the radio telescope arrays that you work with, they pull in phenomenal amounts of data. These modern arrays have terabytes and petabytes for breakfast. What software tools and processes do you use to sift through these impossible volumes of data to find something as rare as you’ve said—we’ve only found 13 of them since 2005?
Kovi: Yeah, so as you mentioned, it’s a lot of data. I think the official rate of raw data that ASKAP gets is about 12.5 terabytes of data per second.
I dug up the statistic that something like four and a half thousand episodes of Play School, everyone’s favorite TV show—you could download every single episode of Play School 10 times per second at that real data rate. So yeah, you’re right. It’s a phenomenal amount of data.
We have these all-sky surveys covering close to 90% of the entire sky from here in Australia. And when we run these surveys, which take about two or three weeks to run, we detect something like 3 million unique radio sources. Even if you have an army of PhD students, you can’t really go through each of those individually and look at them closely.
And so, as you mentioned, we have to have all sorts of software tools and processes to sift through these enormous volumes of data. One technique that we’ve been exploring with ASKAP is using circular polarization filters.
Folks are probably familiar with polarized lenses—polarized sunglasses that you have. Maybe if you’re going skiing or hanging out at the beach, you don’t want to get the glare off the snow or off the water. So polarized lenses filter out polarized light.
What circular polarization means is basically the light as it moves through space can be corkscrewing. It’s a wave that can move up and down, but also rotate as it moves. That’s what we call circular polarization, and it’s a relatively rare phenomenon. Very few natural processes in space create light that is circularly polarized, rotating as it moves through space.
The majority of the sources that we see—the majority of those 3 million sources that we detect with ASKAP—are AGN, active galactic nuclei. These are the active centers of distant galaxies with supermassive black holes that are gobbling up stellar material.
AGN, even though they’re the most ubiquitous sources of these frequencies (we observe at about 1.4 gigahertz with ASKAP), are not known to produce a lot of circularly polarized light. Less than 1% of the light that they produce is circularly polarized.
So by applying this polarization filter, almost like chucking polarization sunglasses on the telescope, we go from 3 million sources down to 100. This is a tractable number that I can sit down and go through and figure out what’s going on.
By doing so, I basically found a bunch of stars, most of which had not been detected at radio wavelengths before; a bunch of pulsars that we had all detected previously using the Murriyang Parkes radio telescope, also here in New South Wales; and then the remaining unknown source that we found was one of these long period radio transients.
Becoming an Accidental Data Scientist in the AI Era
Brendan: That is very clever filtering. That’s brilliant. Thanks, Kovi.
Look, I can’t wait to see what computers will find in all that data that the SKA is going to firehose onto you and your fellow researchers. Right now, we are already fully embedded in the AI era.
Can you tell us what’s going on with AI in radio astronomy, Kovi?
Kovi: Yeah, it’s a great question, Brendan. I think that we are at the point now where we’re kind of on a precipice of having astronomers effectively be data scientists.
It’s a little bit tricky, right? Because as I said, my training was in mathematics and physics and astronomy, with a little bit of coding. But myself and a lot of astronomers of my generation are basically becoming accidental data scientists.
That involves everything from machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies—to look at a whole bunch of different data points and look for the weird one, using a software tool that will identify outliers.
With AI in particular, it’s not just about finding weird things, but also finding ways to optimize the tools that you’re using. In the past, let’s say I would write a bit of code and I would try to get it to run on a small data set before testing it on a larger data set. And if I wanted to make it better, if I wanted to optimize it, or if I encountered a bug and something wasn’t working right—hey, as I said, I’m not trained as a data scientist, so bugs happen—I would end up spending hours or maybe days trying to make those improvements, trying to make those fixes.
I think what’s really great about the AI era, as you put it, is that we can optimize ourselves. We can work more efficiently. We can take a basic piece of code that we wrote to find interesting sources in the sky and, with the help of generative AI tools, optimize it and make it work better. If we encounter a bug, we can fix it faster.
All this to say, you know, we should still be doing the basics ourselves. We need to understand what we’re doing and not just be blindly asking AI to do our work for us. But it’s really been an incredibly powerful tool for all areas of astronomy, and I think it will continue to do so in the future.
The Stellar Rosetta Stone: System ASKAP J1745
Brendan: Fantastic Kovi. AI and machine learning are clearly now the ultimate collaborators for radio astronomers.
Let’s talk about this massive new Nature Astronomy paper that has the global science community buzzing. I just watched your Dr. Carl interview, it’s fantastic. Your team has just discovered what you’re calling a stellar Rosetta Stone, the system ASKAP J1745.
We know, as you’ve just explained, LPTs—long period transients—have been a massive puzzle because they spin way too slowly to be traditional pulsars that you hinted at. Can you take our listeners right into the heart of this system that you found and explain what a cataclysmic variable actually is? What exactly is happening between that Earth-sized white dwarf and its companion red dwarf star?
Now, you and Dr. Kirsten Banks have a great visual on this on YouTube, and I’ll give our listeners a link to it at the end of this interview. But can you describe this in your own words for our listeners?
Kovi: Oh, yeah. So I definitely recommend checking out that visual that you mentioned. There’s a nice video that Dr. Kirsten Banks created interviewing me, and we were standing at Swinburne University’s new virtual universe. We had this wonderful animation up on the wall behind us that was made by Carl Knox and Joshua Preston Pritchard, who’s one of the co-authors of mine on the paper.
This visual basically uses Joshua Pritchard’s magnetic field simulation that we created for the paper to show the interplay between two powerful magnetic fields—one of the white dwarf and one of the companion red dwarf star, like you mentioned. As the two stars orbit one another and spiral around each other, you see how the magnetic fields twist and interact. This, we think, is at the core of the physics that’s producing these long-period bursts.
Now, you mentioned that LPTs have been a puzzle because they spin way too slowly to be traditional pulsars. And yeah, that’s true. Pulsars—these dense neutron stars, the remains from supernovae—spin at periods of milliseconds to seconds. We think we have a good handle on why it is that that spinning is able to convert that angular momentum into the radio bursts that we see from pulsars.
The problem is that that mechanism kind of doesn’t work—it should not be efficient enough to produce the radio bursts that we see if the neutron star is rotating more slowly than tens of seconds, certainly not minutes. And the first LPTs that were discovered using the MWA had periods of 18 minutes, and then 20 minutes, and then one was found at 54 minutes, and so on and so forth.
What’s been interesting is to see the community of radio astronomers who work on pulsars and FRBs saying, “Well, these things look like really slowly rotating pulsars.” And at the same time, a community of radio astronomers who work on things like stars saying, “Well, these kind of look like stars, maybe in a binary, maybe it’s a white dwarf.” So the leading explanations have kind of been a pulsar, a white dwarf by itself, or a white dwarf in a binary.
Now, the problem with trying to make these classifications is that the lazy astronomer in me would love to have a thing that I discover in radio, think, “Huh, that’s a weird thing,” and then look at all of the other wonderful astronomical data that we have from decades of different telescopes—from Gaia in the optical, eROSITA in the X-ray—and be able to cross-match that information altogether with all the proper checks and adjustments and say, “Oh, okay, that’s just a star. It looks weird, but it’s a star.”
The issue with LPTs has been that because so many of them are found close to the central bulge of our Milky Way, it’s a very dusty area. That makes it hard to get clear optical information, so very few of them have had clear counterparts that allow us to say, “Oh, this is the obvious solution.”
As a result, you’ve had a whole bunch of LPTs that seem very pulsar-like, but we need some new physics, some additional mechanisms to explain how they’re producing these bursts. There’s been some really great work done on this by a few theorists. A collaborator of mine at the Open University of Ra’anana in Israel, this guy called Paz Beniamini, who is absolutely brilliant, actually wrote a paper before the first LPT was discovered. He suggested that if you had a pulsar that was accreting material—it had some stuff around it that was landing on the surface—that could kind of boost the energy and the amount of radio light that it’s able to produce while having it spin really slowly.
So there are some physical explanations for why you might have really slowly rotating pulsars. But on the other side, you have members of this population, these LPTs, that really do look like white dwarf binaries.
I think that this system, this discovery, ASKAP J1745, the reason why we’ve been calling it a stellar Rosetta Stone is that we have, for the first time, a really complete picture across the electromagnetic spectrum of what’s going on.
We have the radio pulsations that we discovered, and they’re pulsating at about 1.3 hours or 80 minutes or so—we see a radio pulse. Then we look at X-ray, and with the X-ray information that we have from Swift and from the Einstein Probe, we see the X-ray is also pulsating and changing on this same 80-minute period.
And when we look at the optical information, we see, oh, okay, there are Doppler shifts, right? There is a change in the velocity of the system that appears to be the thing that’s giving off the light that we see—the optical spectral signature, the kind of chemical fingerprint of the system. Those spectral signatures seem to be moving away from us and towards us also with a period of 80 minutes. That’s what helped us realize that we’re looking at a binary system. By combining all of the information across the electromagnetic spectrum, we figured out that it’s a binary system.
In particular, you asked what a cataclysmic variable is. This is a binary system of a white dwarf—a very small but massive, quite dense star that used to be a star like our Sun. This basically happens when a star like our Sun runs out of nuclear material to fuse. It doesn’t collapse into a black hole or anything like that, if folks are worried, but instead, it kind of just fizzles and turns into a hot lump of carbon that slowly radiates away its remaining energy over billions of years. So that’s the white dwarf.
A red dwarf is a star that’s low mass compared to our Sun. In this case, it’s about 10% the mass of our Sun. And so a cataclysmic variable is when you have a binary system with the white dwarf and the red dwarf orbiting around one another. In this case, the orbit takes about 80 minutes for it to complete a loop or a pass of the two stars around one another.
The cataclysmic part is the fact that the white dwarf is using its intense gravity to slowly pull material from the red dwarf star. You have this flow of really hot ionized, electrically charged material being pulled from the red dwarf onto the white dwarf.
What we’ve found is that charged material hitting the strong magnetic field, and the point where the magnetic fields of the two stars interact, is likely what’s producing these regular radio bursts that we see. The process of the material being pulled is likely what’s producing the X-ray light.
So yeah, it really feels like a Rosetta Stone because we can use this kind of complete picture that we have about this one LPT to decode other existing or future discoveries of long period transients that maybe have a less complete picture.
Cosmic Laboratories and Inventions Like Wi-Fi
Brendan: That is beautiful. Thank you, Kovi. Beautiful science. Fantastic. A cosmic cannibalistic dance where one star is literally shredding and eating the other. That is wild, Kovi. Amazing science. It really is a masterclass in multi-wavelength astronomy.
And you’ve noted that these extreme binary systems act as natural laboratories for physics. Now, because we obviously can’t build a stellar-mass magnetic machine here on Earth, what kinds of extreme plasma physics or magnetic field interactions are you hoping to study next using your multi-wavelength approach?
Kovi: Oh, that’s a really good question, Brendan. I think that what’s tricky with pulsars, say, has been to try to figure out exactly how this dense object is able to produce radio waves or radio-wavelength light.
What’s great about having a known class of objects like cataclysmic variables is that we understand to a certain extent a lot of the physics that’s already happening from, say, optical astronomy. We can find ways to measure their magnetic fields. And so I think that what’s really unique is to kind of put these two things together, right?
You have a really extreme environment. The red dwarf star has a magnetic field that’s something like a few times the magnetic field strength of an MRI machine, which is already like tens or hundreds of times stronger than the fridge magnets you might have in terms of how much magnetic force they can apply. But the white dwarf star has something like a million times the magnetic field strength of a fridge magnet. So they’re really unique systems.
As you said, we can’t build this sort of laboratory here on Earth. So what we’re able to do is to study how charged particles behave as they flow in this kind of really intense magnetic and also gravitational environment. This can teach us things about how magnetic fields work and how plasma works. It can have implications for, let’s say, the way that we build sustainable fusion reactors in the future—things like this.
I think that generally one of the fascinating things about science, or maybe especially astronomy, is that the benefits that we end up getting in the long run are not necessarily things that we could easily predict.
By putting satellites in orbit, we have eventually ended up with this fantastic GPS network that allows us to know our location down to the centimetre or the meter. Similarly, with radio astronomy in the early days, we were just trying to figure out what this weird thing was giving off radio-wavelength noise. We eventually started discovering stars and quasars and the centre of our galaxy.
Along the way, in order to help us make these discoveries, the technology that we got was Wi-Fi, which was invented here in Australia at CSIRO. So I think that I could have a guess at some of the things that we might be able to discover, but one of the things that’s really quite special and unique about astronomy is you never know what amazing scientific or technological discoveries you’re going to make along the way.
Squeezing in a Fourth Paper Before Thesis Submission
Brendan: Beautiful. Thank you, Kovi. I love the way you astrophysicists can build these great laboratories in the sky.
Now, I suspect your thesis submission is just around the corner, and I found your thesis title on the University of Sydney website: A Search for Unusual Radio Transients with ASKAP / VAST. How is the thesis writing going, Kovi? Have you set yourself a deadline for submitting your paper?
Kovi: Yeah, I think that for most PhD candidates, that question is somewhat of a scary and impending one because as that deadline approaches, they’re kind of frantically pulling stuff together. I’m quite fortunate; as I mentioned before, my supervision team, my mentors and my colleagues have been extremely supportive and really set me up for success.
As I head towards the deadline for my thesis—I set myself a deadline for the end of next month. Oh, it’s very much around the corner! But yeah, my official deadline is the end of August. That’s the worst-case scenario.
But I’m also at the same time writing another paper on this really interesting work that I’m doing, looking for linearly polarized this time—not circular—linearly polarized variable radio sources, working a lot on AGN, these active galactic nuclei.
So the thesis writing is going decently. I’m happy with it. And the only obstacle to that is the fact that I’m trying to squeeze in a fourth first-author paper before that deadline as well.
The Power of Accessible Science Communication
Brendan: Of course you are. Brilliant, and good luck! Now, looking at that massive workload—doing your thesis, publishing papers in Nature, doing more research, writing another paper—and yet you also find the time to run Fun Fact Science on social media. You do social media posts and you co-host the Nerd and the Scientist podcast. I’ve had a look at a few of your episodes. Fantastic.
Now, we love great science communication here on Astrophiz. Why is doing public outreach so important to you personally, Kovi?
Kovi: I think that science communication—great science communication—played a critical role in my journey to where I am today. If not for science communication, I might not have found a way to motivate myself through the slog that was my undergraduate degree.
So I started Fun Fact Science, which you mentioned, I think during the first summer holidays, kind of at the end of my first year of undergrad. And the idea was, “Okay, I’m learning all this information. It’s hard to keep track, but it’s interesting to me as someone who came from a humanities background.” A lot of these new fun facts that I was learning were quite fascinating. So I thought, perhaps I’ll share them with other people, and perhaps they’ll be new and interesting to other people as well.
In a way, I wanted to keep myself motivated. I wanted to remind myself of how interesting all this stuff is that I’m learning, which otherwise doing an undergraduate degree in the sciences can at times be a little bit dry. What I kind of found myself doing for the following two years—for most of my undergraduate degree—was posting a fun fact every day for two years. You know, writing them myself, getting suggestions from friends or colleagues, having a cool video or image or GIF that would go with them.
At a certain point, I thought to myself, “This is fun and it’s been enjoyable for me, but is this the best thing that I could be doing to help people?” I think that what I realized ultimately was that what was most important to me was to find the best possible use for my time and for my platform.
So what I ultimately ended up doing was pivoting. Rather than sharing fun facts—which there are a lot of wonderful science communication accounts out there on the internet that do that—instead, I focused on trying to find interesting stories and interesting people and help amplify their voices.
I ran campaigns where I connected with a lot of other science communicators, and we ran campaigns together trying to amplify things about women in STEM, for example, or interesting discoveries related to extremophiles—these tiny extreme organisms that can live anywhere from the deep sea to potentially in outer space, you know, in the jets of materials coming off the moons of Jupiter.
As I built up this community, what I realized as I was doing all of this work was that I was more passionate about having these conversations—you know, getting to meet interesting people, learning about their science. Because again, coming from a non-scientific background in my schooling, I really didn’t have a chance to learn why all of these other sciences were interesting. Rather, I was mostly just learning about astronomy in my own journey at university.
So that’s something that was a big deal to me. It’s why myself and my co-host Benjamin Salles started the Nerd and the Scientist podcast. Benjamin runs a huge Facebook page called Science Actually, where he also does the fun fact thing and also kind of shares a lot of interesting information. The whole idea is to find people doing interesting science and share that in a way that’s accessible to other people.
As I said, my undergraduate degree was a slog for me. It was difficult. It was an uphill battle. And I think that the important part of learning about the universe is to understand it and communicate it, right? So you’re not just learning about things to publish a paper, be it in Nature or otherwise. I think we should be learning to educate ourselves, to educate those around us, and to really try to make the world a better place through education.
Brain Hacks: Productive Procrastination & Mind Management
Brendan: And you do it brilliantly, Kovi. It’s one thing to have all the pipelines and all the data sets, and it’s another thing entirely to have the clarity to interpret it—something you’re particularly skilled at.
Now, you are solving some of the most puzzling phenomena in the cosmos, which requires an immense amount of focus. How do you do your best thinking? What are the conditions that you have to create to filter out all the noise in the world around you and find those clear signals in your own thinking?
Kovi: I mean, if only it was as simple as applying a circular polarization filter to my brain and then everything suddenly pops out and becomes clear!
I was having a conversation with one of my siblings about this yesterday. As I mentioned, growing up as a kid, I was a little bit of a hyperactive student and couldn’t always focus. I’ve been trying to have these conversations with my siblings and with a lot of colleagues of my generation who are educators, especially people who work with neurodivergent kids, as to how I’ve figured out this path. How do you go from being the hyperactive ADHD kid to being able to, as you said, find clarity in this storm of data—or this torrential downpour of data?
I think that to do my best thinking, I don’t force it. There’s a never-ending amount of work that a researcher could be doing. And I think that what’s important for me is to recognize what condition my mind is in, right? Am I feeling anxious? Am I feeling hyperactive? Am I feeling unfocused?
Just like when I was in my undergraduate degree and I thought, “Oh, I have to keep working on homework until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., just finish the thing,” only to wake up in the morning and realize that doing work while you’re half asleep means that you’ve only done poor quality work and you end up needing to waste another few hours completely redoing it. In undergrad, I realized the answer is… sleep, shockingly, right? You need to sleep normal hours, need to lead a healthy lifestyle and set healthy boundaries. That may be different from person to person, but find what works for you and don’t force yourself into a place where you’re uncomfortable and you’re ultimately not working well.
And so, in the same way, when it comes to how I think about research and science, if I find my mind in a place that is not conducive to a particular task, I have another task that I can switch to that will maybe use a different part of my brain. If I don’t have the headspace to be writing code or doing programming, I can maybe try to do some writing.
If the environment I’m in is too noisy—you know, if I try listening to different music or listening to the sound of rain or white noise, whatever it is, and nothing seems to be working—I switch to tasks like reading scientific papers or maybe responding to emails with collaborators that I have overseas.
I think this hack, if you will, of just kind of recognizing where your mind is at and choosing the task accordingly allows me to… procrastinate in a productive way. Right? Rather than burning out and forcing myself to do something, I task-switch in a way that allows me to be efficient at a bunch of different things.
And so I think that’s kind of how I allow myself to be productive—to work on a whole bunch of different projects and not force myself to, you know, be the best programmer all day every day, but to really kind of follow the lead of where my mind is at and work accordingly.
Joy, Relaxation, and Trekking Mountaintops
Brendan: Beautiful. I love that phrase, “productive procrastination.” That’s incredible. It’s very inspiring, Kovi.
And look, I’ll dig a bit deeper—a natural follow-up to that. I always try and show the person as well as the scientist. You’ve certainly showed us more than just the scientist. Given all the time that it must take, as you’ve alluded to, to research a new paper, to research for your PhD, to write your thesis paper (and obviously it’s more a book than a paper), you’re leading those international research teams, you’re meeting your self-imposed SciComm deadlines… I presume you sometimes eat and sleep. What are some of the other things that bring you great joy and relaxation each week?
Kovi: I think that the thing that brings me the most joy is to surround myself with good people who I know only want to support me and only want me to succeed. And these are also honest people, meaning I know that they care about me, and because they’re honest, I know that they can give me criticism—constructive criticism that I can take properly.
If you try to get feedback from someone, or if you get feedback rather from someone who isn’t a close friend or someone you don’t really trust to be honest, you might think, “Oh, they’re just jealous of me,” or “They’re just trying to manipulate,” or this or that. And so I’m very fortunate—both my partner and my family and my friends, these people know how to be supportive, know how to hold me accountable for the work that I need to do, but also hold me accountable to take time off when I need to and to have that relaxation.
In the specifics for relaxation, my partner and I and our dog, we love nature, we love hiking, going for walks. In addition to hiking, I just did a fantastic hiking trek across the Kepler Track in New Zealand a couple of months ago with some mates. It was a really nice way to disconnect.
Some people talk about “work hard, play hard.” I think it’s not about playing hard. It’s about finding a way to allow yourself to disconnect and say, “Cool, I’m going to be on a mountaintop in New Zealand this week,” or scuba diving, which I also love to do and find incredibly relaxing. It’s almost like being in space from what I hear! Finding these pockets of time where you can allow yourself to disconnect, to relax, reboot, and then you come back refreshed and you can tackle all the things that you need to do.
Targeting Next: Postdocs and Magnetic Cosmos Mysteries
Brendan: Beautiful. That’s a great approach—allowing yourself to relax rather than making yourself do it. That’s beautiful. Thank you.
Okay. The future of radio astronomy in Australia is looking brighter than ever, especially with the Square Kilometre Array coming online over the next few years. And as you prepare to wrap up your PhD and submit in August and take the next big leap in your career, what are the big cosmic mysteries that you’ve got your sights set on next? Have you got any postdocs on the horizon? Where is the path to the stars taking Kovi Rose?
Kovi: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m still deep in the application period of trying to find a postdoc. My ideal world is to find some role that will allow me to keep doing this sort of research that I’ve been doing in radio astronomy. We have a wonderful, wonderful group at CSIRO at the Space and Astronomy Department who do incredible research. I would love to work there.
There are also some incredible groups around Australia—here where I’m calling from in Sydney, but also at other universities—that are really taking charge as Australia steps up in the next few years to play an incredibly important role. And not just in the SKA, which is coming online in Western Australia, but also in the way that radio astronomy is going to be playing a complementary role to the recently launched LSST, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time that’s being run on the optical Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
There are a lot of different things that we can contribute as a country and that I’m hoping to contribute with my skill set. I think that the main mysteries that I am keen to dig my teeth into are kind of utilizing the skills that I have—both relating to radio astronomy and stellar astronomy and data science in both of those fields—and to solve mysteries like how the magnetic fields of weird and wonderful stars work.
We know so much about our Sun because, as we all know, it’s relatively nearby, but the magnetic fields of other stars are a bit more of a mystery. I’ve had a chance to work on stars ranging from failed stars like brown dwarfs to really intense white dwarf stars like the one in this long period transient. Both white dwarfs and brown dwarfs have incredibly strange and yet powerful magnetic fields. So these are the sort of mysteries that I would like to try to help solve in the coming years.
The Golden Mic: Remembering Our Shared Humanity
Brendan: You are being drawn into the magnetic cosmos. Fantastic, Kovi. Thank you so much.
Look, to wrap things up now, I’m handing you the golden mic for your favourite rant or rave. What is the one thing in the world of science that you’re most passionate about right now? You’ve told us a lot already. Tell us about one of the challenges that we face in science—in equity, in representations of diversity, or in science denialism. That’s my favourite bugbear. Or perhaps science career paths, or your own passion for research, which is booming. And perhaps our human quest for new knowledge.
The microphone is all yours. What is your final word for the Astrophiz audience?
Kovi: Oh, it feels like a lot of responsibility holding the golden mic!
I think that I’ve had a fairly unique journey, and the more scientists I speak to, I realise that the norm is not normative. We all have these complicated journeys. We are all complex human beings, so “we contain multitudes,” as it’s been said, right? I think that science has gotten a lot better—the scientific communities have gotten a lot better in terms of equity and diversity and representation, and we’re definitely moving in the right direction.
I think that for me, given my background, given the fact that I spent the first 10 years of my adult life living in Israel, you know, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem… I have a lot of colleagues there. It’s been a fraught few years. And I think that what I would really ask of the audience is to just remember the humanity—just remember who the people are. Right? That, let’s say, people from a country aren’t their governments.
It’s been a hard few years for everyone on Earth. And it kind of feels like before these past hard few years, there were another hard few years. So that’s kind of the nature of reality is, you know, life is difficult. We have to find the things that we’re passionate about, work towards them, and in doing so, hopefully make the world a better place.
So I would just urge people to remember that. To remember, in the words of Carl Sagan, that we are all stuck here on this little mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam on this ball of dirt together, and that all that we can do is to kind of keep pushing forwards on our quest to make ourselves better, to make humanity better, and to hopefully discover more about the cosmos.
Final Wrap-Up and Links
Brendan: Beautiful words from my heart, which I share entirely with you, Kovi. Beautiful.
Look, just before we go, I’ll send our listeners to your great article about your LPT discovery in The Conversation.
It’s at tinyurl-DOT-com / lptkovi
That’s —tinyurl-DOT-com / lptkovi that’s L-P-T-K-O-V-I, all lowercase, all one word.
And for those who are more visual, that brilliant short reel that you and Kirsten and your colleagues
(Carl Knox and Joshua Preston Pritchard) have made, it’s at tinyurl-DOT-com / instakovi
That’s all lowercase, all one word.
Well, Kovi Rose, on behalf of all of our listeners across the globe, and especially from me, I’m so grateful. It has been an absolute pleasure to hear your stories and how your team has solved one mystery, found heaps more, and opened the door for new discoveries and understandings.
Good luck with submitting your thesis, the next phases of your research journey, and those upcoming travels which are inevitable.
Perhaps you could also solve the mysteries of FRBs in your free time for us, please?
Kovi: Hahahah
Brendan: May your career continue to be such a blast, Kovi. Thank you so much for joining us on Astrophiz.
Kovi: Thank you, Brendan. It’s been a pleasure—a rollercoaster as well. Thanks for giving me this opportunity to talk about my science and all the wonderful people who are involved in my work. It’s been fun. Catch up.
Brendan: So make sure you subscribe to Astrophiz, tell your Astrobuddies, and join us on the first of each month for Dr. Ian Musgrave’s SkyGuide so you can plan your observing schedule, and on the 15th of each month for an in-depth interview with another one of the world’s leading space scientists.
Have fun! Look up! Clear skies!
MUSIC SFX: Radio Waaaaves!