Profile

I’m an astronomer studying asteroids and comets orbiting our Sun. Asteroids are mostly made of rock, while comets are mostly made of ice. By measuring what they are like, we get clues to how our Solar system was born and how it has changed over  time.

One of our main jobs is finding Near-Earth Objects  which could someday hit the Earth. They can be the size of a small mountain, and travelling at 40,000 miles per hour. They don’t often hit us, but when they do the explosion can be hundreds, thousands or millions of times larger than a nuclear bomb.

I use telescopes all over the world. Sometimes I have to go and operate the telescope myself, sometimes I send students, and sometimes the data is taken for me and sent back to me in Belfast.

The telescope I am concentrating on using right now is called Pan-STARRS, and it is on the island of Maui in the Pacific Ocean. It has the largest digital camera in the world, and we use it each night to scan the sky and detect asteroids and comets.

Here’s a photo of me standing next to the camera we use – it’s bigger than me!

So far we have found over 800 with Pan-STARRS in just 3 years, and none are on a collision course right now! Just in case, I work with another team of European scientists to work out how to stop a collision happening.

Every morning I check my email and reply to ones that have come in over night from colleagues in the United States.  I work at a University so most mornings I will be doing some teaching, sometimes  to a class of over 100 physics students. Other times I help students with their projects,  like studying gases just above the surface of the Sun, or looking for comets around other stars.

After lunch I generally spend some time doing science. This could be discussing the latest results from  students studying for their PhDs with me, or continuing the analysis of all the data we’re getting from the Pan-STARRS telescope. We’ve got over 7 million detections of asteroids and comets so far, so this is taking some time 🙂

All of this is changes if I’m away at an observatory. There the day starts in mid-afternoon when I wake up. I’ll prepare my plans for that night, have dinner before sunset, then be using the telescope all night until it gets light again at sunrise. And all on a mountain top over 9,000 feet high – I love living and working up there!

This picture of me watching the Milky Way setting shows what the sky looks like, far away from any streetlights.