Haida Liang
Early Life
Haida grew up in Shanghai, China but moved to Sydney, Australia to finish school. At first, she struggled to understand the Australian accent, despite speaking English. This meant that she enjoyed maths and physics classes most because the equations were universal. At university, she started a medical degree, as she thought if you got good grades that’s what you should study. She soon missed physics and maths and transferred to the physics department.
Research Areas: Imaging and Sensing, Conservation, Science and Art
"I’m working on the boundary between optical imaging and history… physics and history are the two things that I love."
Anthony Aveni
Early Life
Anthony grew up in West Haven, Connecticut in the USA and attended a poor inner-city school. He went to Boston University where he just passed his degree in physics. Anthony went on to study for a PhD at the University of Arizona, working on the new telescope at Kitt Peak. During this time, Anthony and his wife were struggling to get by, and so he started to look for jobs which earned more money. He managed to get a position at Colgate University and moved across the country to New York State.
Year born: 1938
Research Areas: Archaeoastronomy, Ancient Astronomy in the Americas, Mayans
Jarita Holbrook
Early Life
Jarita was born in Hawaii and grew up in California in the USA. They are from a family with strong academic links (both parents got science degrees) and Jarita decided to follow in their parents' footsteps and studied physics at Caltech. Jarita went on to get a PhD in astrophysics from the University of California, investigating star formation.
Year born: 1965
Research Areas: History, Cultural Studies of Astronomy, African Indigenous Astronomy
Allan Chapman
Early Life
Allan was born in Swinton, Lancashire in the north of England. As a child, he was always interested in tinkering and making things. He made his own telescope when he was 11 and used it to look at the Moon. He was from a working-class family and career options were limited. When he left school without qualifications, he was expected to start work in a local factory. Instead, Allan decided to get a job in a local library.
Year born: 1946
Research Areas: History of Science, History of Astronomy, Broadcasting
Karl Schwarzschild
Year born: 1873
Research Areas: Relativity, Black Holes, Quantum Theory, Stars, Comets
"Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, march in one front."
Stephen Hawking
Early Life
Stephen was born in 1942 in Oxford, UK during World War II. He decided that he wanted to study mathematics at university, but his father wanted him to choose medicine instead. He was accepted into University College Oxford but because they did not offer a degree in mathematics, Stephen chose to study physics. After three years (and, in his words, "not very much work"), he graduated with a first-class honours degree in natural sciences. From there, he went on to study cosmology at Cambridge University.
Year born: 1942
Research Areas: Cosmology, Theoretical Physics
"All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them."
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Early Life
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (known as Chandra) grew up in Lorhre, British India (now Pakistan). Chandra came from an academic family. His uncle was a physicist and Nobel Laureate and his mother loved learning. She encouraged young Chandra to be curious. His mother and father taught him at home until he was 12. Chandra got a BSc in physics in 1930 from Presidency College, Madras. He then won a scholarship to study for a postgraduate degree at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK. He received a PhD in 1933.
Year born: 1910
Research Areas: Stellar Evolution, Black Holes
"My motive has not been to solve a single problem, but to acquire a perspective of an entire area"
Katherine Johnson
Early Life
Katherine Johnson grew up in West Virginia, USA. Her mother was a teacher and her father a farmer and handyman. Katherine was curious about numbers from an early age and took every course in maths she could at West Virginia State College. She graduated with the highest honours in 1937 and took a job teaching at a Black public school in Virginia. In 1939, Katherine became the first Black woman to study for a postgraduate qualification at West Virginia University. She then took a break from studying and teaching to have children.
Year born: 1918
Research Areas: Rocket Flightpaths, Trajectories, Orbital Mechanics
"I loved going to work every single day"
Stargazing
Of course unlike a hundred years ago, not all astronomers look through telescopes. Now they can programme complex computers to model what they see. The programmes are told to follow the laws of physics, and then the simulations are forwards and backwards in time to get a fuller understanding of what is happening.
In astrophysics, you need to combine the computer simulations, and the observations from telescopes, to be sure about a theory.
Perhaps the most obvious career relating to space and astronomy is ‘star-gazing’. Looking into the Universe and trying to figure out what is going on.
Computers
Interferometers use a network of antennas, over a wide area, to create a virtual much larger single telescope. It would be impossible to build such instruments without powerful computers. Signals from different antennas must be added together with atomic-clock precision. Software must separate real signals from background noise and then produce a result that is useful for astronomers.