Dr John Baruch
We caught up with Dr John Baruch at the Stargazing event in Bradford and asked him some questions the Awaaz team was curious to find the answers to.
What do you hope to gain from the day?
“What we’re wanting to do today is to tell people how beautiful it is looking at the sky, and really how good it is as an opening, a door opening into careers in science. We think science is very important, because it enables people to work right across the sciences, and it enables us to have jobs, and to make new products and pay our way in the world. The banks haven’t done very well, so we want people to take up science. Astronomy is one little bit of science, but what’s important about it is that everybody can see the stars, everybody can see the sun, and start thinking about it, and working out how science works. And it’s very accessible. So once you start with astronomy, then you can start understanding how all the other things the textiles, the physics, the chemistry, the biology, learning about plants, learning about medicines, you can start understanding how all that works. And so it’s an opening into science and understanding how science works and hopefully innovating and creating new products, new materials, new drugs, new textiles, all sorts of things. So we think it’s very important. We want EVERYBODY to be involved.”
What’s the technology that’s been used to map stars today?
Well, essentially it’s the CCD technology, in your phone, most people have cameras. It’s the same technology that’s used in the phones, in those cameras.
The stars we’re looking at today, how long ago has it been since light set off from those stars?
Well if you look at the nearest star, which is in the southern hemisphere, four light years away, the light has taken four years to get here, so you’re seeing the star as it was. If you look in the winter sky, you can see Orion in the evening, you can see Sirius, a very bright star, that stars seven light years away, so you’re seeing the light that set off seven years ago. Yet if you look in the winter sky, high in the sky, you can just see a faint patch of light, which is the Andromeda nebula, that’s what the telescope shows, a beautiful nebula, but you can see this little patch of light, and the light that’s entering your eyeball set off two and a half million years ago.
Space colonisation, now Professor Stephen Hawking has mentioned about that being the next frontier as such, what’s your opinion regarding it?
Well, I think now when we look into the sky, one thing we’ve found in the last few years, is that every star we see in the sky, was born with a group of planets, like our own planets going around the sun, but they’re a long, long way away. I think the probability of them having intelligent life on them is very high. We’re building very big telescopes to now try and find planets like the earth, going around these distant stars. So it’s quite likely some of them will have intelligent life, but to get there is virtually impossible. I mean if we built a rocket that went ten times as fast as we went to the moon, it would take ten thousand years to get to the nearest star.
What’s likely to happen with the big telescopes and everything, we’re likely to pick up radio or programmes or TV programmes that have set off years and years ago from these systems and can show us what these places are like. If it was fifty light years away we could send the message out and if you live to be one hundred, you’d get the reply back, so it’s not possible to do really any exploration or things like that. I think we’ll go to the moon and I think people will go to mars. I think the moon particularly, because it’ll be absolutely fascinating to go for holidays on the moon, but mars is much harder.
Do you see in our lifetime ever getting to mars in a way that we can actually explore the planet?
I think in the lifetime of the people who are at school now, we will go to mars and we will explore mars, and I think there will be holidays on the moon in the lifetime of the people who are at school now. I think it’ll be fantastic, I’d love to go.
I think I’d join you. Bradford University also has a telescope in Tenerife, how can people log on to that and use that?
Its my.telescope.org.
if people want to really get into the education program and the star missions, the university does subsidise enormously, but requires a charge. We charge £7.99 for people and they can use the telescope all year. We’re really keen for people to do that because the education programs are really good and they support people getting into science.
Thank you very much for speaking to us, the events been wonderful and very successful.
