Bitesize Episode: Dr Rebecca Bowler - Astronomer

In this bitesize podcast episode, the our student interviewers Nia, Bea and Willow are going to introduce you to Dr Rebecca Bowler, an Astronomer at the University of Manchester. If you'd like to find out more about Rebecca's work keep an eye out for the extended interview which will be released in a couple of weeks.

Some resources that Rebecca recommends are:
The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms by Marcus Chown (ISBN: 9780099578017)
The Life Scientific Podcast - Listen on the BBC website

If you know a group of students who would like to interview female or non-binary role models, please get in touch by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com

Likewise, if you know anyone who would be a great role model, let us know by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com

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Check out our website

If you know a group of students who would like to interview one of our role models, please get in touch by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com

Likewise, if you know anyone who would be a great role model, let us know by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com

Follow us on Instagram @STEMUntapped
Connect with us on LinkedIn @STEMUntappedCIC
Check out our website

Transcript

Intro  00:00

Hi, I'm Izzy host of the STEM Untapped podcast. This week our student interviews Nia, Bea and Willow are interviewing Dr. Rebecca Bowler. Rebecca works as an astronomer at the University of Manchester.

Dr Rebecca Bowler  00:17

So thank you. It's really nice to be here and to be able to chat with you all today. My name is Rebecca Bowler and I am a scientist. I'm an astronomer, and I work at the moment at the University of Manchester. So it's called the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, which is quite a mouthful. But basically, it's affiliated with the Jodrell Bank Telescope, which is really amazing radio telescope near to Manchester. But I'm based in the city of Manchester, and I am a researcher, I research galaxies, I want to know how galaxies form in the universe. And yeah, that's it, basically.

Nia  00:51

I'm Nia. And we're year 11 students doing our GCSEs, and I'm doing food nutrition and preparation, religious studies, geography, and BTech sport. And obviously the English and maths and triple science.

Willow  01:10

My name is Willow. And I'm studying art, drama, geography, and French and triple science and maths and English.

Bea 01:20

I'm Bea. And I'm studying religious studies, history, geography, and drama, and then triple science as well as the maths and English.

Willow  01:30

I think we chose it because it's just so different from anything we've ever been almost taught about. And it's just that sort of new thing. It's quite exciting.

Nia  01:39

I agree with Willow, like we don't really get taught about like space and things like that at school, necessarily. So we thought it'd be quite interesting to learn about it. 

Willow  01:47

As an astronomer, what does your job entail?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  01:54

It's quite varied, which is why I really like it, actually. So people think I look through telescopes all day, or I stay up all night looking through telescopes. But that's, that's not at all what it's like, actually, I spend my whole day at a computer. But through that, I do my research. And so that's a bit of everything, I would say. I spend some time looking at data. So what I work on is images of the sky, and I look at galaxies in those images. So that's kind of my research part of the day. But I also, as I said before, I like meet students quite a lot, I have quite a lot of telecoms with my collaborators. So it's actually quite a lot of talking in my job, talking to different people, discussing ideas, you know, discussing the data, discussing which telescopes we want to use and stuff like that. I also do quite a lot of reading, because, you know, science is so fast moving and that everyone around the world is working on these problems. And so every day, I check online, and I see oh there’s 10 more articles have come out, I read those. So I read some of those, I'd like to read all of them, but it's quite a lot. And I just try and kind of absorb all the ideas that have happened since the day before. So yeah, it's a bit of everything. I do a bit of data analysis, a bit of, you know, talking and a bit of reading. So it's really good fun.

Bea 03:26

We're just wondering if like any discoveries that you have been a part of, or things that you've found out through your research?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  03:34

My PhD project up in Edinburgh, was looking at some new data, some new images we had, when I started my PhD supervisor, he sort of said, here are some files, go and have a look and see if you can find any galaxies in these files. And we were expecting, like based on the previous work, so all the all the other people had been working for decades before that, that maybe I would find one of the galaxies I was interested in. These are really special galaxies, because they are extremely distant from us. And so they're very rare, but very exciting when we find them. So I thought, Okay, I'm going to spend a few years trying to find one galaxy, but I set to work. And actually I found I found 10. And that was really exciting. It was super exciting. It also made my PhD work a bit more interesting because I had 10 galaxies not just one so that's nice. But it was like really exciting for the scientific community as well because it changed what we thought was happening in terms of the physics, it meant that galaxies could form like more often than we thought before. So it was actually really interesting scientifically as well. And that's kind of been the starting point of my career was this discovery of more galaxies than we were expecting. So that was really, really exciting. And then I mean, science is all about discovery. So I kind of since then, have been finding more interesting things about these galaxies. I've looked at them with the Hubble Space Telescope. And I found that they were actually looked like they're merging. So they actually looked like two, two blobs merging together. That was a discovery as well. And so it kind of happens on and off. But the one I remember the most is the first when I was a student. 

Bea 05:19

Which university did you do your physics degree at?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  05:22

So I went to the University of Cambridge. And I did... It's quite unusual there because they do this natural sciences degree. So it's, it's quite a unique thing. So you don't you can't just do physics, when you start, you have to do four subjects. So I did maths, chemistry, physics, and this material science, which was just like you had to just do four, I did that. So it meant that like, you had to do a lot of subjects. And then eventually, I ended up specialising more into physics later on, which I, which I preferred, but it was nice to know a bit more about like chemistry at university level, I would say.

Nia  06:01

You said about how you sit at a computer all day, or you're on meetings and emails, what does your average day sort of look like? Do you work at night? Or do you just look at what other people have found out?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  06:12

Yeah that’s a great question. So I don't work at night. The only time I stay up late is if there's a very important meeting like telecom I have to go to. And because we work internationally, some people are in Australia, and some people are in America. So sometimes the only time we can all meet that's vaguely sensible is at like 10 or 11pm. But that's very rare. I would say we've none of us want to do that. But so no, I work in the day, and it's my usual day is I cycle into the university. So I cycle to work. And then I would check my emails just to see what's going on. If I've missed anything. And then like this morning, I often have student meetings in the morning. So I have a PhD student, but I also have undergraduate students who are doing projects with me. So tomorrow morning, I have two hours of meetings with them, which I really like it's really good fun, and kind of helping helping them with their projects and the problems they're having with the data, and so on. Where I work is really nice. Like we're all on the top floor of this, this building called Alan Turing building. And all of astronomy is on this one floor. So it's really sociable. So like at lunchtime, or coffee time, we all go to the same like common room. So I will do that, if I'm at work that day. And then my afternoons are a mixture of coding. So my actual work that I do, and trying to find these galaxies is using computer coding. So this is how I go from the images. So I get sent these, they're just like photos basically, of from the telescope. But to actually get information from those, I have to run software on those images and have to write my own code to find the galaxies and to measure things from them. So things like the colour of the galaxy, the shape of the galaxy, this sort of thing. So if I have a free afternoon, that's, that's my favourite thing to do. That's what I really love to do. So I get to, like, have the image there. But I'm also like writing this code, and then I can extract the information I want. And that's how I do discover these galaxies and work out what's going on with them.

Nia  08:14

What do you find like the most rewarding part of your job? What do you enjoy most about it?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  08:18

I really like solving problems. I like hard problems. I mean, you know, to get to get to like my level, you kind of have to want to solve problems because they're like, that's basically your job. And yeah,

that's what I really enjoy. Like, if I have a free day and something looks wrong, like you know, stuff goes wrong all the time in research, like in a lab or on my on my computer. If I can just spend a few hours and I can solve that problem and like somehow, you know, I fix I fix the… I’m try to think of an example like all my problems are quite boring but like I fix some problem with like the image alignment or something like this or, or I find a galaxy that I couldn't find before or like, that sort of thing is so satisfying. And it's like, I just love that. I out headphones on, and I just focus on trying to fix this problem. And then, you know, it might take a day, it might take a few hours. But once you once it works, you're like, Ah, so satisfying.

Willow  09:09

Going back to the galaxies you found, do you have a favourite galaxy?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  09:16

I do have a favourite galaxy. It's called ID 304416. So I hope you remember that later. It was actually in my first ever publication like it was one of the first things I did in my PhD was find this galaxy. And we've just spent a lot of time going back to it because it's, it's one of the brightest that we have. The galaxies I'm looking at are very, very rare. And they're typically like, like little smudges in the data. They're very, they're very unremarkable in the data. But this one, when we went back to it, we went back to it with the Hubble Space Telescope, and we went back to it with a telescope called ALMA, which is just like huge array of telescopes in Chile. And it just gets more and more interesting. Like we found that it has like two big clumps that we think are merging together. And then it looks like some parts of the galaxy are hidden. So we didn't realise they were there before. But they were actually hidden by a screen of dust. So I talk to dust, talk about dust to people and they're like, What are you talking about, like dust in your house? But this is like like astronomy dust. It's cosmic dust. Yeah. So this is like, if you look at a picture of the Milky Way, you see like this dark stripes across, you've ever seen that. That's dust in the Milky Way, like, this is dust in my galaxy. And what it does is it like conceals one side of it. So we didn't know it was there. Yeah, so they have the dust in Milky Way. And then in this particular galaxy, which is my favourite galaxy, there's one half of it, which is completely covered by dust. And if this goes back to what I was saying about collaborating with different different people in different countries, using this telescope in Chile, we were able to see through the dust, and we found we found the kind of second half of this galaxy. And so it was just, it's just been a really nice continuation of my PhD work seeing this source in all these different wavelengths, and all these different components, like the stars, and the dust and, is really, really, yeah, it's my favourite. And I think it's really interesting.

Bea 11:19

Would you say, with your job that you get access to things like sick pay, and for people that would like to maternity leave, and things like that?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  11:27

Yeah, the University of Manchester has a has a policy on this. And so I do have access to that, like, as a staff member, I get time for maternity leave, I don't know what it is. But it's the kind of official one. The one issue with research is that it's kind of is based on grants. So I actually have my own grant, like a five year grant, which is just like a pot of money to pay me. And so they often have different different terms and conditions to the university would have. And they sometimes have a hard deadline at the end, which can be very difficult if you have a baby, because you can't, you want to extend but you can't. But fortunately, I'm paid by the UK Government. And they have very good maternity leave policies. So yeah, that's all fine. 

Willow  12:12

Apart from astronomy, do you have any other interest that you do outside of your work?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  12:20

I have a cat, me and my partner have a cat, which I was hoping she would appear but she hasn't. She's gone to sleep. Sometimes it's she's someone sits on the windowsill behind me. So I’m like having a very serious telecom. And then they're like, oh. But no, I think she's asleep. I'm also really into like being outside like walking and cycling, I do a lot of cycling. It's like my passion. So I went, I went cycling yesterday. And I just love that because you meet lots of people, and you get to go to really exciting places. And it's also like a great escape from work as well like sitting in front of my computer. Like inside. It's just nice to just go out and be in the countryside.

Nia  13:05

Do you work like a Monday to Friday, almost like a school day, and you have weekends free to do like your other interests? That's like…

Dr Rebecca Bowler  13:10

Yes, yeah, I have the weekends free. I try and work nine to five, like occasionally, as I said, like, there might be some telecom I have to go to an evening. But that's very rare. And I don't enjoy that. But it has to be done. Occasionally. Yeah.

Bea 13:24

Any advice you had for kind of our generation, the next generation wanting to go into STEM?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  13:29

I guess in general, my advice would be just kind of follow what you find interesting. I mean, STEM is such a huge field. And, you know, being a scientist, or being an engineer, or a mathematician or whatever. It's all about curiosity. And it's all about having a passion for something. And it's, I liked astronomy, but I made sure that when I was doing my physics degree that I explored other parts of physics as well and other parts of science because I wanted to, you know, it's all about learning, isn't it and all about and all about discovering things, and you never know what you might discover and suddenly realise, oh, that's actually really interesting. Maybe I should, maybe I should do that thing, you know.

Izzy  14:14

Can you recommend any resources for anyone who's interested in astronomy? To find out more about it? So any books or TV shows or social media accounts or anything else?

Dr Rebecca Bowler  14:25

Yes. So my favourite book when I was a teenager was about science was called The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown. And this is a book about how like, different elements are formed in the centre of the sun. And it's like connects like chemistry and physics and astronomy and I really, really liked that when I was a teenager. I'm a bit out of date with podcasts. I really like The Life Scientific which is probably like slightly for older people, but that's really nice. It's on BBC Radio 4.

Izzy  14:53

Thank you for joining another STEM Untapped podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, then subscribe for free on your podcast app. You can follow us on Instagram @STEMuntapped. If you know of a school or group of students who would like to interview female or non-binary role models do get in touch. Likewise, if you know of anyone who would be a great role model then let us know. Our details are all documented in the show notes.