Profile

I’m a 26 year old guy living just north of London with my girlfriend, no dog yet but checking Battersea Dog’s Home every day in case one needs us! I am a fiend for fruits and sweets, particularly bubblegum cola bottles. I love eating and drinking, and travel a lot to different cities around the world to try delicious things. Best pizza I ever had was a margherita in Italy, next to the coast in a really loud takeaway full of teenagers playing pokemon. I’ve always liked science and explaining why something magical happens, like levitating  rocks and lightbulbs that don’t need a plug socket. I’ve always done Judo and more recently jiu-jitsu, because I love the feeling of flying you get if you’re thrown properly – and being able to block punches and kicks feels pretty cool.

I use space-based satellites and ground based observatories to observe the Sun in lots of different ways. For my work the most useful way is using Ultra-Violet light (the kind that sunscreen is designed to block!), using a satellite in space called the Solar Dynamics Observatory. You can look right now at the images I use – go to Helioviewer.org – Solar and heliospheric image visualization tool and play around with the drop down menu on the left hand side that has a number (wavelength), for example it may start on 304. You will see the Sun right now in different ways, that we label the different ways using different colours. You can also go back in time and see what the Sun looked like in the past, like on the day you were born!

Anyway I use these images and movies to look for waves. There are gazillions of waves happening all over and inside the Sun at any one time, so the ones I am especially interested in are in the Sun’s atmosphere called the corona. It’s the bit you can see during an eclipse, and has lot of shapes in like loops, huge snake-like blobs called “prominences”, and where explosions happen a lot. If you are on that website, go to the number “171”, and that’s the corona (this image looks yellow). I look for waves on the loops, where the loop wobbles from side to side, a bit like a guitar string in slow motion. Then I use a nifty bit of maths called magnetohydrodynamics to work out what the local conditions are at the wave – so how hot it is, how dense/heavy the loop is, and how strong the magnetic field is. Knowing this we might be able to explain some of the Sun’s big mysteries – including why it gets so hot in the corona, when all the energy of the Sun is made in its core.

My typical day requires a lot of looking at different datasets of the Sun, and trying to understand what each of them is telling me. I look at different wavelengths of light (ultra-violet, infra-red, microwaves, X-rays) to look for signs of waves. To make sense of all the data I use a lot of processing, a bit like a scientific version of Photoshop. I usually have to code my processes myself using programming languages like Python, and IDL.

One cool example of a process I use is called “motion magnification”. You plug in a video, and it comes out with all sideways motion much bigger. For example my friend at work took a video of a lamppost in the wind – with the naked eye you wouldn’t see any movement. But after this motion magnification, you can see the lamppost shaking wildly with the wind! I use this to look for teeny weeny waves on the Sun (when I say tiny, I mean in terms of the very large Sun – these waves are about the same as the size of the Earth!).

Apart from making videos of the Sun, I do a lot of maths to work out what wave I am looking at and what I can learn from it. This often requires lots of reading scientific papers, and occasionally writing my own. I also help teach the first year physicists at my university about maths, marking their homework and giving tutorials.