Friday, May 11, 2012

What Does An Astrophysicist Do?


Apologies for the hiatus in posts these last few weeks, life and work have been very busy. Since I've been swamped with so much work, I thought I'd take the time in this post to describe what  an astronomer or astrophysicist does on a daily basis.

When you think of life as an astronomer, the first thing that comes to mind is telescopes and star parties. You imagine the scientists out late at night staring through their telescopes and taking notes about what they see. While this part of the job, astronomers have much more to do. Graduate students and professors in astronomy spend most of their time teaching, doing research and applying for grant money. They teach or assistant teach college courses, and are constantly writing proposals to different organizations asking for money to fund their research. But what does "doing research" actually mean? In astronomy, research can mean one of three things: taking images with a telescope  and analyzing them using a computer (observational astronomy), writing computer programs to simulate interactions between objects in outer space (theoretical astronomy), or building telescopes, cameras, and detectors for astronomers to use (instrumentation). The first two require you to sit at a computer most of the day and  write computer programs to perform certain tasks. Observational astronomers also spend a lot of time applying for observation time on both space and ground based telescopes. If their proposals are accepted, they receive images from the telescope that they can then analyze to understand the physics and properties of the objects they are looking at. Theoretical astronomers are more like physicists or mathematicians.  They think of a situation that might occur in outer space, write down all of the physics equations  that govern the system, and write computer programs to simulate what's going on. Then they can compare their results with real observations to see if they are correct! The last group of astronomers spend most of their time in labs, building and testing devices for other astronomers to use. This is a more hands on job, and takes just as much engineering skill as it does astronomy knowledge. If it weren't for these people building nice cameras and telescopes, astronomers would be out of a job!

Aside from doing actual science, astronomers spend a good amount of time writing papers about their findings, doing community outreach, and presenting their work at conferences and colleges around the world. Being an astronomer is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. It's a fast paced and never ending job, and there is always more to learn about outer space!