Women and Science

‘Women and Science’ Series – From burnt toast to the Big Bang: How galaxies at the beginning of time affect your breakfast

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Dr Rebecca Bowler is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. Rebecca’s research involves studying some of the early galaxies that formed within the first billion years in the life of the Universe. In this blog post, Rebecca talks about the thing that inspired her to pursue a career in astrophysics. Burnt toast, and her mum.

My mum always burns her toast. Always. It used to drive me crazy as a teenager.

It was about that time, at the end of secondary school, that I started to get interested in astronomy. I fell upon a book called The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown. It explains how those Carbon atoms that make up the burnt layer on my mum’s toast were created in the cores of stars. I was hooked.

As I studied more physics, I learnt that there was a time before a single Carbon atom was formed. After the Big Bang, the Universe was a vast, hot, empty* and somewhat boring place. Nothing as exciting as Carbon existed, because no stars had yet formed.  It took a few hundred million years for things to start to get interesting again, with the formation of the first generation of stars and with this, the first illumination of the Universe with starlight. These stars were nothing like those we see in the night sky. Because of their different chemical composition they were monsters, with a single star containing hundreds or even thousands of times the mass of our Sun.

*empty of “stuff”, no planets, no stars, just some Hydrogen and Helium atoms drifting around.  Plus dark matter.

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Today I research the formation of the first generation of stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Using telescopes, it is possible to capture the light from incredibly distant galaxies. Because of the vast scales involved, the light from some of these galaxies has travelled for over 13 billion years to reach our telescopes. This means that by looking at an image of a galaxy, we are seeing into the past, glimpsing how that galaxy was many billions of years ago. Images like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is therefore like a time capsule for astronomers, with each point of light pinpointing a galaxy at a different distance and hence time within the Universe.

With these observations of galaxies, it is possible to find out what the Universe was like back in the first billion years. The chemical composition of the stars is imprinted onto the light we observe. I work with telescopes around the world, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to discover early galaxies and search for the fingerprints of the first stars. Back in 2012 I visited the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii to make observations. 

Standing on the summit of the mountain, surrounded by all the humongous telescopes, I was reminded of how far I’d come since opening The Magic Furnace ten years previously. When I burnt my toast that morning after 14 hours observing through the night, I was one step closer to understanding how those Carbon atoms came to be. But I was still no closer to understanding why my mum always burns her toast.

Rebecca at the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii .

‘Women and Science’ Series – Women and Space: Inspiring the next generation of scientists

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Helen Pooley, the Museum’s Learning Officer, introduces the display in her blog, and talks about why inspiring girls and women to pursue their passions and curiosity in the sciences is important.

The History of Science Museum has many wonderful objects. We also have some great paintings of illustrious scientists on our walls. Unfortunately, there aren’t any women amongst them.

Last year, to celebrate 100 years of women getting the right to vote, we put up a series of portraits in the Basement Gallery of women, past and present, who’d made a contribution to science. We also had a display featuring the work of Ada Lovelace and some of the early female pioneers of photography alongside a programme of events for families, schools and adults.

The renowned astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell who features amongst our banner portraits. Photo taken by Keiko Ikeuchi

This year the portraits are still on display in the Basement Gallery, but we have updated our displays with a particular focus on Astronomy and Space Science. We have highlighted two books associated with female astronomers, both of whom practised astronomy at times when a formal scientific education was denied to women.

The first is Caroline Herschel who was the first salaried female scientist recorded working in England and author of the 1798 Catalogue of Stars which contained her own corrections to the work of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal.

The second is Sophia Brahe, the sister of Tycho Brahe who wrote the 1572 book De nova stella. It is believed that Sophia assisted in the observations recorded in this book, which included the discovery of a new star at a time when it was thought that the heavens were unchanging.

The image of Caroline Herschel Silhouette from our collection.
This is the only surviving portrait of Caroline Herschel as young woman, and must have been painted before she left Germany to come to England in 1772.

We are also keen to highlight the work of contemporary female scientists in Oxford and are in the process of putting together a small display relating to the work of Suzanne Aigrain, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, which we have discovered has its own interesting links to our collection.

Astrophysicist Suzanne Aigrain. Photo taken by Keiko Ikeuchi

Suzanne searches for and studies extra-solar planets – planets which orbit stars other than the Sun. One of the methods she uses is the transit method, when a planet passes in front of its host star (as seen by an observer on Earth). This method has been used to observe planets in our own solar system for centuries. We have featured in the display a manuscript produced in 1761 showing which parts of the Transit of Venus (the silhouette of Venus as it passes across the sun) would be visible from different places on Earth.

We are also really excited to host a series of blogs written by female graduate students of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, which we hope will help inspire scientists of the future. These are going to be published on our website in the run-up to our fantastic Women and Science comedy night, presented by Jericho Comedy in the Museum on Wednesday 4th December.

Alongside this, we are planning to re-run our KS4 Study Day on Women in Astronomy on 11th March 2020. Last year’s Women in Science study day was overbooked so we’d advise schools to book soon to secure places.

For more information about our Study Days: https://hsm.ox.ac.uk/study-days

Finally, look out for more Women and Science talks and events next year, including our family day, Lovelace’s Labyrinth, on 14th March 2020.