Meet...Dr Sadie Jones

I appeared in the University of Southampton, Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering Newsletter this month :)

Meet...Dr Sadie Jones Can you tell us about yourself and your role within Physics and Astronomy? I work as the Outreach Leader in Astronomy. My job involves managing a group of PhD and Undergraduate Astronomy students who work with the mobile planetarium. We go out into schools to do shows for Primary - A–level student groups, and also do shows on campus for events like Open Days and BBC Stargazing Live. What do you think are the benefits of the outreach work carried out in the department? I think its important to show students of all ages in local schools what real scientists in the UoS look like and also it's important for the students to realise that scientists are just normal people and that science is a realistic job prospect for them. There are still so many questions we don't know the answer to so it is important we inspire the next generation of physicists and astronomers to further our understanding of the Universe. Can you tell us about some of the activities you carry out in the outreach team? We go out into schools twice a week during term time with the mobile planetarium. I also give a talks on aliens for primary level which features inflatable planets and I give a talk on Supermassive Black holes for GCSE, A-level and Astronomy societies, which focuses on my PhD research. I am especially excited because I will be joining the UoS Roadshow at Bestival talking about the INTEGRAL gamma ray telescope and other UoS astrophysics  research to the festival goers. Are you enjoying being a science correspondent on BBC Radio Solent? Yes, It's really fun. I enjoy doing the background research on the 3 science stories and it's an adrenaline rush to explain them live on radio when I don't know what questions I will be asked about the stories.  I am learning so much more about recent UK science news as a result and I hope the listeners learn more too. If you want to keep up to date on all the latest news from the Astronomy Outreach team your can follow them on Twitter @SotonAstrodome

Communicating Astronomy Conference

Communicating Science: A conference on Science Education and Public Outreach

Tucson, Arizona, USA 4-8 August 2012

What we did

Sadie Jones and Ally Caldecote went to Tucson, to participate in a conference on astronomy outreach. The first two days were a ‘Galileo Goes to Mars’ Teacher workshop, composed of astronomers and teachers. The following three days were a much larger conference of astronomers and educational researchers.

There was a mixture of lectures, discussion groups, hands-on activity workshops, poster presentations and software demonstrations.

Who we met

We met astronomers and educators from all over the globe. Of particular interest were some PGCE students who were invited to do science communication research as part of their studies at East Carolina University. One of the students, Sarah Guffey, has conducted research into the effectiveness of teaching using a planetarium setting. This is hugely relevant as Sadie spends the majority of her time taking a planetarium show into schools and Ally’s department hopes to purchase an inflatable planetarium soon, for her to use with school groups. Early research findings suggest that learning about astronomy is much more effective in a planetarium than on a 2 dimensional screen. Professor Sharon Schleigh whose background is in Astrophysics but now works in science education, was able to get a grant to work with the Education Department to do these research programs. From speaking at length with the 3 PGCE students it is clear that carrying out this science communication research has given them a better understanding of physics and an excitement for their futures in teaching. We feel that this idea of getting early career teachers from the Education department involved in real science education research is great, and would be something well worth considering.

We met Robert Hollow who conducts outreach across all of Australia, and has also run his ‘Pulse at Parkes’ workshops in both England and Wales. Rob has been doing outreach in CSIRO for more than 10 years, and is well travelled. We feel he is an excellent contact to bounce ideas off in the future. The ‘Pulse at Parkes’ radio astronomy workshops allow the students to analyse real data from the Parkes radio telescope. The idea is that in the future, this program will be similar to the ‘Galaxy Zoo’ project but using radio imagery/data rather than optical data. We feel it is important that students get excited by radio astronomy as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is currently being built in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and pathfinder telescopes for this array already exist in the UK (e.g. LOFAR). Many jobs will be created in the future through radio astronomy so it is important that the students get excited about it. Sadie is particularly interested in implementing these workshops in her outreach as her PhD thesis was on the subject of radio astronomy.

Paul Roche and Sarah Roberts are astronomers based at the University of Glamorgan in Wales and were keen to hear about the Ogden Trust and are interested to find out more about working with them. They run the Faulkes Telescope in Wales, which is part of the LCOGT telescope network (which will soon have ~40 telescopes across the world, we also met Rachel Ross who works for the LCOGT). This program allows schools and teachers time on the telescopes, to collect data in real time. Sadie attended their talk on use of their interactive website where students can make their own asteroid and see its effects on a chosen location on the earth. They also told us about the numerous educational resources which exist on the their website which we can use in our outreach activities. Paul has also offered to help Sadie with the ‘wording’ of the questions used in the outreach evaluation forms in order to get some critical responses from teachers.

Shawn Laatsch runs a planetarium in Hawaii, has promised to send Sadie some resources that they give out to teachers to study pre and post planetarium show activities.

Zoe Buck has done research into how people respond to astronomy visualisations in planetariums. She gave us advice on evaluating our planetarium shows, and getting students to fill out our questionnaires by offering small incentives to those who fill out the forms e.g. colour changing pencils for younger children.

We discussed

• Reaching students where there is a language or cultural barrier, and a variety of strategies to involve those students equally. • Using social media such as facebook, twitter and blogging to increase impact • Using music alongside astronomy to widen its appeal to those who might consider themselves ‘not very scientific’ • Using mobile phone apps to promote learning, especially after the main outreach event has taken place • Rumours of doomsday happening in December 2012 (something which is worrying a number of students), and the corresponding facts. • Hands on activities for the students to understand the scale of the planets in the solar system, and their relative distances. • Mars curiosity landing (live viewing) and understanding of the extreme engineering involved in the mission.

What is the impact?

We found that people were very keen to hear about our work in the UK, and how we went about it. If we attend this conference in the future we would be very keen to give a presentation (either individually or jointly) about the work that we do.

We will develop and sustain connections with (particularly) Zoe Buck from the University of California Santa Cruz and Sarah Guffey from East Carolina University about their work on how students learn in a planetarium environment in order to make sure we are making full use of best practice and research findings.

Ally will encourage the academic staff responsible for the purchase of the inflatable planetarium to do so.

Sadie is going to implement the scale of the solar system activities, and a section on the Mars Curiosity rover into her ‘Aliens in the Universe’ outreach workshop.

We both feel much better prepared to answer questions from worried students about the rumours behind the Doomsday predictions and explain their origin and scientific basis (or lack thereof).

We feel freshly inspired in our work after spending time with people who share our passion for physics outreach and share similar goals to The Ogden Trust.

My PhD Research

At a 'new media' in science engagement course that I attended yesterday I was informed about blogging and asked to write about my research (without jargon) in approximately 200 words by Jon Copley (@expeditionlog), here i write my first blog, slightly extending on the 200 word version I cobbled down on the course. I hope this blog will be the first of many in my attempts to engage with all members of the public who wish to know more about astronomy...Here goes...!

Since the re-write I have been told by my dad who has read the original blog that it is not in fact jargon free so the passage below titled My Research Take 1 is the further edited version. It is so hard to write jargon free when you are used to using Jargon...science communication is hard!

Since writing this post back in 2010 I have been again asked by my colleague Pearl John to prepare a few paragraphs on my research...so this attempt is titled My Research Take 2 , this was written in May 2012.
Please do give me feedback on 'Take 2' as I am continually trying to make it as accessible as possible.

My Research Take 2 

The ultimate goal of my research is to better understand the surrounding environment of black holes. Astronomers still do not fully understand AGN and their part, if any, in forming the galaxy it is the centre of.  I did research on the galaxy NGC 4051 which has a supermassive black hole at it's centre. One might think that black holes are a rare thing in our universe but they are actually thought to exist at the centre of all galaxies. The one at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is very 'quiet' and we only know of its existence by measuring the high speeds of stars at the centre of the galaxy which appear to be orbiting a very massive something. We know it is a black hole and not just a massive something/turtle because physically anything that is 3 times the mass of our Sun could not withstand the forces on the object which result from it being so massive.

The black hole pictured here is not a 'quiet' beast, like the one at the centre of the Milky Way it is  very active, which means matter in the disk of material around the black hole falls in (accretes) inwards, toward the black hole . We think there are large magnetic fields which come out of the 'poles' of the black hole, just like the magnetic field from the poles of our Earth. These magnetic fields are extremely powerful and particles that do not fall into the black hole get accelerated outwards along the magnetic field lines, we see this stream of particles as a jet from the black hole. 

The jets are imaged here using the C array of the Very Large Array(VLA) which is a radio interferometer/telescope in New Mexico, USA . I looked at the centre of the galaxy, NGC 4051, during 2001 every few days to see if the radio core (the darkest part, at the centre of the image) was changing in brightness over time. If the core got brighter over a few days this meant that particles were being injected into the jets at a higher rate than normal. The extended structure shown as contour levels around the core of the galaxy represents the jets that are emitted from the black hole. For my research, I was only interested in the central part of the galaxy because I was not only looking at how the radio brightness at the centre changed but how the X-ray brightness changed. To study the X-rays from NGC 4051 I looked at it with the RXTE X-ray telescope at the same time as I looked with the VLA. I wanted to see if the number of X-rays coming from the core of the galaxy increased when the brightness of the radio increased. An increase in radio and X-ray at a similar time shows there is a relationship between the disc of material around the black hole, which gives out X-rays and the jets which extend from the 'poles' of the black hole, which gives out radio.

The jets from black holes are very mysterious and can extend to sizes far larger than the Milky Way itself, they could be involved in catalysing star formation in nearby galaxies. In fact, we shouldn’t think of black holes as  'monsters'  that gobble every thing up, astronomers are realising that they may actually play a large part in the formation of stars and galaxies in our Universe.

My Research Take 1

My research is about supermassive blackholes. One might think these are a rare in our universe BUT they are actually thought to exist at the centre of ALL galaxies. The one at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is very 'quiet' and we only know of its existence by measuring the high speeds of stars at the centre of the galaxy which appear to be orbiting a very massive something. We know it is a black hole and not just a massive something/turtle because physically anything that is 3 times the mass of our Sun could not withstand the forces from being so massive...therefore a Black Hole is the only thing it can be.....

...This means our Solar System on the Orion Arm of the Milky Way is slowly rotating around a massive hole.


The black holes (BH) I study are not 'quiet' beasts but instead are very active, they have disks of material around the BH much like the disk of our own Milky Way........the matter in the disk falls in (accretes) onto the BH . From the BH there are large magnetic fields, if you imagine these fields as lines along which particles that do not fall into the BH get accelerated it can help you to understand jets. These 'active' type of BH are officially called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We believe that the large mass of the BH (more than a million times more massive than the Sun!) causes these strong magnetic fields, electron spiral around these fields and do not fall onto BH instead they producing jets . These jets of material come from both the top and bottom of the BH, these jets can extend out so far into the universe, and have lengths which themselves are of the order of the size of the Milky Way itself.


The disc around the BH  emits radiation at X-ray wavelengths and the jets emits at radio wavelengths. To investigate the physics of the AGN we measure the radio brightness and X-ray brightness simultaneously. To detect the X-ray and radio waves we use the X-ray telescope the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the Very Large Array , a radio interferometer in New Mexico, USA respectively. We look at how the light/brightness in X-ray and Radio varies with time and note the time that peaks occur in both curves. We compare the lightcurves and look for time lags i.e. times when X-ray and Radio light might increase at similar times. The time lags between the light curves tell us about material emitted in the disc and in the jet. From this we can deduce information about the physical nature of the blackhole. i.e. if both peak at same time this tells us the disc and jet around the BH are connected and 'know about each other'.


What is particuarly interesting is the relations between jet (radio) and disc (X-ray) brightness/light hold for the smaller blackholes called Galactic Binary BH's (10 times size of sun as opposed to AGN which are a million times as massive). These smaller black holes exist within galaxies, so we can investigate those within our own Milky Way relatively easily. This means we can look at the smaller, closer by blackholes in order to learn more about the supermassive black holes or AGN's. This is particularly useful because even now astronomer know very little about black holes and the jets and disk around them.


The ultimate goal of this research is to better understand the environment of the black hole. Astronomers still do not fully understand AGN and their part, if any, in forming the galaxy it is the centre of. 


Jet's are also very mysterious and can extend to sizes far larger than the Milky Way itself, they could be involved in catalysing star formation in nearby galaxies. Infact, black holes might not be the 'monsters' we are lead to believe they are, they may actually be responsible for alot of galaxy and star formation in our Universe :) .

Centarus A - Galaxy with a super-massive black hole

Being a radio telescope at the Very Large Array, USA