Prof Carole Mundell started in 2007 as prof in Bath
Sun is an ordinary star. Gives us life.
Light colour of distant galaxies tells us about physics of stars. Such as Doppler shift and whether stars are new bright blue stars or old dying red stars.
Cro magnon man drew cave paintings of constellation. Such as Taurus the bull or Orion with a planet crossing it's path leading to a new feature.
Kepler saw moons about Jupiter. Took his gamma ray burst data. Found a pattern for the planets orbit.
Stellar mass black holes a few miles across 300 times mass of our sun collapse at the end of their lives.
Shadow of a black hole. Detecting a black hole: detect mass falling in to black hole such as stars and gas and their movements due to the gravity.
Merlin massive radio telescope near border with Wales. Auger network of detectors in S America.
Non-stellar AGN emissions massive jets of particles and gas emitted explained by black hole.
Spinning disc of light acts like a lens turning light beam passing through it into a laser. Black hole evidence. The water is moving at great speed so that the light beam gets red shifted by 500m/s on one side and emitted as laser beam while on the other side it is blue shifted by 500m/s and there is gain in the system through the energy added by the gravity of the core and other energy gained from system and we can detect this from Earth.
GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) afterglow allows a detection as light fades away over days after gamma ray burst. This is a powerful tool as we detect energy of entire sun over its whole life in a few seconds.
GRB robotic followup as it is such a fleeting event and easily missed by casual observer.
Prof Mundell likes to talk about magnetic fields. Fireball magnetisation. Detecting polarisation of observed light beam to detect magnetic field so polarisation is a magnetic field driven process. Remarkable how magnetic fields survive for so long after initial explosion.
Shrimp has 2 bit low light imaging in its eyes which is a great basic detection set up for astronomy!
Invited to do PhD when she interviewed for masters and is now head of physics at University of Bath.
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