doctorBenton

I apologise if this is out of line, but i really do intend this as a serious question.

Reading your answer to aWickedGang, where you talk about living in fear and the authority of the leader, all i can think is ... how do you not see the self same process - albeit on a much smaller and less sinister scale - in all organised religion? And from there, in religion in general ... how do you not see all of it as a scam?

I believe that he is talking about Sally Cray: here's the tweet, here's the article from the tweet, and here's another article about her recruitment from the ABC to 'a senior policy advisor in Turbull's team'.

I'm currently working on a new way to use the physical phenomenon of weak gravitational lensing to probe the dark matter halos that surround individual galaxies. If it works, it'll be really pretty cool.

I'm also particularly interested in the main stages of a galaxy's life. For some reason, it seems that all of the most massive galaxies are finished. They don't appear to have formed many or any stars in the past few billion years, and they definitely aren't forming any new stars just now. They are also mostly elliptical, rather than disks. But we're really not sure how or why galaxies undergo these major evolutionary changes.

As to your second question, from what we know, it seems virtually certain that life is common in our galaxy. The thing you want to look into is called the Drake equation. Also, just today, there was a widely reported press conference laying out a roadmap to discovering life (or at least habitable planets) in the 2020s, if not before.

The first part of my PhD was focussed on adding near infrared data to a very well studied 'deep field'. Infrared is helpful, because it probes the ordinary starlight from very distant galaxies in the early universe. The particular thing that i wanted to look at was how the most massive galaxies grow from when the universe was only 1 or 2 billion years old to now.

In the second half of my PhD, i focussed more on nearby galaxies, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. First i looked into how well it is possible to estimate a galaxy's mass, using just the observed colours.

Then the last paper was confirming that there really are no 'early type' galaxies that are as massive and as compact as those found in the very early universe. This implies that galaxies have to keep evolving, even after they stop forming stars. This is really weird: they have to grow in size without increasing their masses.

Here's a lay summary if you're really keen.

This is hard to answer, because there are a bunch of different ways to tell the story.

I was definitely okay at maths and science as a kid, but i never really felt that inspired by anything there. In the last couple of years of high school i discovered history, and art, and this was the first time that i was really exposed to ideas. So when i went to Uni, i studied history and philosophy.

In my second year, i did mostly epistemology (nature of knowledge) and metaphysics (nature of existence), and i came around to the idea that if you want to make sense of the universe, then it makes sense to ask the universe what it thinks. It seemed to me that empirical and experiential knowledge was what matter. And so i found my way back to science.

Originally, i started physics wanting to demystify quantum mechanics, and then i wanted to be an astronaut. That's obviously not why i stayed in the field! But that is (part of) the story of how i found my way to astro.