 School
girls join study to understand black holes and the birth of stars
August 2007
Black holes are some of the
most bizarre objects in the universe. They can have as much mass as a billion
stars combined. How did they form and how did they get so big?
“What are they doing to the
galaxies in which they live?” asks Dr Ilana Feain of the CSIRO’s Australia
Telescope National Facility.
This is one of the biggest
questions facing astronomers in the 21st Century. The 29-year-old astronomer
will use her L'ORÉAL Australia For Women In Science Fellowship in her
quest for an answer to this question.
And she is enlisting two
Australian girls’ schools to contribute to a 24/7 program to observe a
‘nanoquasar’ and its associated black hole some billion billion kilometres from
Earth.
What role do black holes
play in the creation of stars and galaxies? Stars form from collapsed clouds of
interstellar gas. When black holes are nearby do they help concentrate that gas
to make stars easier to form, or do they blow the clouds apart before the stars
can get going?
“Black holes could play an
important role in star formation and galaxy evolution,” says Ilana. As a PhD
student Ilana made a series of remarkable observations of black holes in the
most distant galaxies in the cosmos.
“Ilana is intelligent,
enthusiastic and has a very probing style,” says Ron Ekers, Federation Fellow at
the CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility.
“She digs into the
fundamentals and develops a clear understanding of both the instruments she is
using and the objects she is studying.”
Ilana has travelled to
major observatories in the USA and Chile to make her observations, and she has
attended a number of prestigious meetings and workshops overseas.
While this sort of
international travel is a necessity for scientists these days, she has her
sights firmly set on a career based in this country. Australia is one of two
possible sites for what will be the largest radio telescope in the world – the
Square Kilometre Array.
Ilana is keen to get her
hands on it to extend her work. “The galaxies and black holes I’m studying are
basically the most distant objects in the universe—they existed when the
universe was less than a tenth of its present age—and we have no idea how these
bodies could have formed so quickly after the Big Bang,” says Ilana.
Ilana’s other passion is
public outreach: talking to school students and adult groups to convey the
excitement of the work she and other astronomers are doing.
“I feel rewarded when I go
into schools and give them a ‘this is astronomy’ talk and they ask questions,”
she says. Ilana actually dropped out of school after year 10, but soon changed
her mind and went back to finish Year 12.
“I was never inspired when
I was a student. I didn’t enjoy school, but here I am now a physicist!” she says
with a wry laugh. This is part of why she is so passionately committed to
spreading the word about the excitement and wonder of scientific research and
why she has already taken part in many outreach activities.
“I’m very committed to my
work in astrophysics, but I also want to spend a lot of my time taking science
to the public through various outreach activities,” she says.
“I think it’s important to
encourage students and let them know how exciting science is, and how much
opportunity is out there.”
This is one reason why she
is now involved with an ambitious project enlisting high school students to
contribute to for cutting-edge astronomical research.
Global Jet Watch—an
initiative being led by Dr Katherine Blundell at Oxford University in the UK—is
establishing small observatories at five girls’ boarding schools around the
world, Tara in Sydney, and one in India, South Africa and Chile.
A second Australian site is
proposed for Perth. The students will make real scientific measurements of the
behaviour of a famous black hole system called SS433.
“This exotic phenomenon
fires jets of hydrogen from near its black hole at speeds of over a quarter of
the speed of light in two directions. These sweep out along an axis every six
months, producing a corkscrew pattern. As visible astronomy can only be done at
night, keeping a constant watch on SS433 is impossible for a single dedicated
observatory and yet is essential for us to understand the physics of nanoquasars,
and by analogy of quasars and radio galaxies,” says Ilana.
The data will be combined
and processed by Global Jet Watch scientists and, it is hoped, will lead to a
better understanding of these bizarre cosmic beasts.
Ilana was approached to be
the Australian scientist for the project, and will divide her time between
training and encouraging the students and analysing the data they generate.
The L'ORÉAL For Women in
Science Fellowship will greatly facilitate this work. It promises to be an
exciting and rewarding endeavour—and the perfect outlet for Ilana’s talents and
interests.
2006 PhD (Astrophysics) The
University of Sydney
2002 Bachelor of Advanced
Science with Honours Class I (Physics) The University of Sydney
1996 Higher School
Certificate The Emanuel School Career highlights
2006- Bolton Post-Doctoral
Fellow, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, Australia
2003-2006 Laboratory
assistant, School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Australia
2000-2001 Research
assistant, CSIRO, Australia Telescope National Facility, Australia
1999-2000 Research
assistant, School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Australia Honours,
grants and awards
2003-2006 CSIRO
Postgraduate Student Research Scholarship
2003-2006 Denison PhD
Award, School of Physics, The University of Sydney
2003-2006 Australian
Postgraduate Award Scholarship
2002 Denison Merit Award,
School of Physics, The University of Sydney
2002 The University of
Sydney Medal
2000 Cadbury-Julius Sumner
Miller Scholarship No. 3 for Senior Physics, The University of Sydney
2000 The Walter Burfitt
Scholarship No. 2 for Senior Physics, The University of Sydney
Teaching and public outreach
2007 Australian scientist,
Global Jet Watch
2007 Invited talk,
Astrophysics for Physics Teacher’s Workshop
2007 Invited talk, Sydney
Girls High School Astronomy Club
2006 Teacher, Topics in
Modern Astronomy, Continuing Education Series
2006 Teacher, NSW hSC
Cosmology Distinction Course
2006 Teaching Associate
‘Wildflowers in the Sky’ outreach campaign: Taking astronomy to remote schools
in Western Australia
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