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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 14 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sarah Casewell answered on 14 Jun 2014:
That’s a tough one!
I think the obvious difference is that we all research different things. Even in what looks like quite narrow areas of astronomy, we all have different skills and knowledge.For instance in brown dwarfs we have astronomers discovering new ones, modelling their atmospheres, modelling their formation, looking at how metals form dust in their atmospheres, looking at weather in their clouds, calculating information about molecules etc. I look at what happens when you heat a brown dwarf up – my objects are in close binaries (they go round their host once every 2 hours!) with white dwarfs, which are very small, but very very hot. This means one side of the brown dwarf gets heated up, and one side doesn’t. I’m trying to understand how this works, and what happens to the atmosphere.
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Nate Bastian answered on 15 Jun 2014:
That’s a tough question. We’re all interested in slightly different topics, and we all have particular things that we’re good at, and other things that we’re not quite as good at. I guess one thing that I think make’s me a bit different, is that I tend to see things in different ways from many other scientists. This is because I like to change subjects (within astronomy) often. Whenever you start looking into a new subject, you see it with “fresh eyes”.
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Sam Connolly answered on 15 Jun 2014:
I think I’m quite good at being open minded about different possible answers to problems in science. Sometimes it’s easy to get drawn into a particular explanation for what we see even though there are other explanations that are just as likely to be true with the information we have. It’s important to take all the possibilities into account so you don’t miss the right answer!
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Roberto Trotta answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Every scientist is different from every other — we all have our strengths and weaknesses, a bit like sport people. Also, like sport people we all have different roles: for example, in a football team a defender plays differently than say a striker, or a goal keeper.
It’s the same in science: even though we are all scientists, we all do different things. In my case, my thing is to use complicated maths to look at long lists of data gathered by telescopes, in order to make sense of them. I usually don’t look at pretty pictures of the sky — my data are just huge files with lots of numbers in them. That’s what makes my job fascinating to me — to use maths to make sense of long list of numbers and understand what they say about dark matter and the Universe.
It’s a bit like a detective’s work, trying to work out what really happened from the few leftover traces. It’s great fun!
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Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:
As others have said, we’re all different because we are studying different things. That’s what makes science so great and so interesting; everyone is doing something just a little bit different, even if we are all working to answer the same big questions!
I would say I am slightly different because I am not a traditional astronomer. I am a geologist by training that is now looking at rocks on Mars; I guess this makes me a lost geologist as geology is “Earth-science” and not “Mars-science” but I enjoy it nonetheless.
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