Here’s some depressing news: even in the farthest reaches of
the universe, the Me Too movement has reason to exist. Humanity
now has the ability to spy on something close to the beginnings
of creation; a journey through time as well as space. But just like
everywhere else, it seems most of that time and space is reserved
for guys. No one told Dr. Rachael Livermore that when she first got
started in astrophysics, though. For her, it began the old-fashioned
way: by being a total nerd.
“I got into it through science fiction,” Rachael says. “I used to read
vociferously when I was a kid. I had a single mother who couldn't
keep up with my reading habit, so she would just pick up whatever
she could find in charity shops. One day, the book she picked up
was Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, and I got completely hooked.”
After churning through all the science books at her local op shops,
Rachael’s uni ambitions were set, but personal circumstance got in
the way. (“I didn't have any money, basically.”) Instead, Rachael went
into accountancy, which is maybe how she ended up as treasurer
of her local Tolkien Society. And why she was at a Lord of the Rings
anniversary event that ended up changing her life.
“We had a speaker who was an astronomer from the US, and she
gave a talk about the lunar equation myth in Tolkien,” Rachael
enthuses. “It's really fascinating how, if you trace through successive
drafts of his work, he's updating his lunar equation myth to fit with
scientific advances at the time. It just blew my mind that there was
this woman who did astronomy for a living. I don't think I really
understood that was a thing.”
The next week, she quit her job and moved to London for uni (this
time with a bit of cash in her pocket). Rachael slogged her way
through a bachelor degree, a master’s and a PhD in England, before
doing post-doctoral research work in the US and Australia. And for
most of that time – thanks to an effect called ‘gravitational lensing’- she had her sights set on distant galaxies. Like, really distant.
“According to Einstein's theory of relativity, gravity isn't just
something that happens mysteriously at a distance,” Rachael
explains. “If you have mass, you curve the space around you.
If you're looking past something that has a lot of mass, the light
coming from the distant thing has to go through this curved space,
and it gets bent just like a lens. So, if you have something very
massive, like a cluster of galaxies, it's like putting a magnifying
glass up in space. If you look at things that are behind that glass,
they look bigger and brighter.”With distant galaxy clusters acting as convenient magnifiers for
even more distant regions of space, Rachael spent a good part
of her day “looking at things so far away that the light has taken
almost the entire age of the universe to get to us”. Rachael’s “baby
galaxies” date roughly 95 per cent of the way back to the Big Bang- though, from our end of the lens, they mostly look like distorted
blobs on a screen. (“I've spent an inordinate amount of my time
staring at specks and thinking, ‘Is that a galaxy? Or is it a fleck of
dust on my computer monitor?’”) But those blobs can explain a lot:
how galaxies form; where most of the periodic table comes from;
and at what point the very first stars coalesced into something
twinkly and life-giving.
In more immediate nerd terms, astrophysics is also a cool way to
talk about sci-fi (and vice versa). So, it’s become part of Rachael’s
mission to champion events combining the two, like her Astronomy
on Tap pub talks in the States, or Big Screen Science in Melbourne,
which saw her chatting about the relative scientific merits of thefor dr. rachael livermore, staring
into space is all part of the job.
WORDS JO WALKERgalaxy quest
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