Dr Anne’s Log: Hailing Frequencies Open (Stardate: 2017.24)

A very famous physicist once said:

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough”

and like pretty much everything else, Albert Einstein was right about this too.

In astrophysics sharing our findings with the public in an easy to understand way is really important to us, because after all what is the point of discovering all these wondrous things about the Universe if you never tell anyone about them? In fact, its so important its one of the work packages of the SFM project! So I thought I would give you a summary of what’s been happening on this front and let you know how you can get involved if you want to 🙂

Well firstly, have you noticed the new look of the website? Kinda hard to miss huh! We’ve redesigned the website to make it more user friendly (and pretty haha). We also now have a twitter (@SFM_Project) so hit that follow button for 140-character updates.

Then there’s Soapbox Science and Art Leeds for which I am collaborating with Dr Eirini Boukla, an artist from the University of Leeds School of Design, to produce a SFM research inspired art piece to accompany a talk I will be giving on said research at the Leeds Light Night Festival later this year (updates will be posted here and on Twitter). For those of you unfamiliar with the festival, Leeds Light Night is an annual multi-arts and light festival which takes place over Leeds City Centre over two nights in October. SFM is honoured to have the opportunity to take part and we hope to see you there!

Until next time this is Dr Anne Over and Out 😉

Begoña: “Do you ever look up at the stars and try to contemplate the ends of the universe?”

– Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour

My name is Begoña, and I just started my internship at Quasar. I am an undergraduate at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, finishing my Physics degree. Since I always loved astrophysics, I got really excited when I was given the opportunity of helping here with the project.

Quasar is developing the software needed for the SFM project, making the Gaia and Herschel database more accessible for the current and future research. Also, we are preparing the Workshop that will take place in June.

Looking forward to learn a lot in these months.