On February 11th the School of Physics and Astronomy joined in with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science celebrations, using Twitter (@PhysicsUoL) to showcase some of the valuable, innovative research currently being led by women around the School.
In this second in a series of three posts, we move beyond the planetary explorers discussed in the previous post, leaping up the spatial scale to bring us to some incredible new developments in astronomy being led by women in the School, bringing together instrumentation and theory to learn more and more about how the universe works.
Astronomical Achievements
Starting on the instrumentation side, Dr Charly Feldman has been working on SVOM, a Chinese-French gamma ray burst satellite due for launch in June 2022, since 2015. She has played a key role in the project, assisting with the testing of the flight model optic. This is a pioneering optic design which has since been adopted for many other missions.
The degree of expertise in instrumentation for X-ray astronomy within the School is further illustrated by the work of Dr Hannah Lerman, as part of the ESA M5 THESEUS mission proposal team at the University of Leicester. She is involved in designing and characterising the Soft X-ray Imager instrument, which will allow astronomers to identify and locate high redshift gamma ray bursts.
In addition to instrument scientists, the achievements of a couple of X-ray astronomers were also highlighted during the day, taking advantage of the latest X-ray telescopes already in space to delve into some of the most extreme physics in the universe. Dongyue Li is currently working with data from the XMM-Newton Slew Survey – including observations from the UoL-built EPIC-pn camera – to perform a census of transients and variable sources. She is working under the guidance of Associate Prof. Rhaana Starling, who is leading a programme at Lofar to test models of the composition of relativistic outflows in gamma ray bursts observed by the NASA Swift Observatory.
Shifting wavelengths to the millimetre and submillimetre domain, Dr Alison Young has also been breaking new ground as part of a team which has found the first direct evidence of disc tearing in a protoplanetary disc, working with observations from the ALMA Observatory.
In our final post of this series, we’ll look at the future of astronomy in general, and future and current leaders in our School.
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