Cambridge Festival: Speaker Spotlight

Dr Matthew Bothwell is an astrophysicist, science communicator and author, and the current Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Part of Matt’s work is to deliver outreach to schools, run stargazing evenings, give public lectures, and write about all things astronomical. He is also a Bye-Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. 

Matt will be giving his talk, The Great Alien Hunt!, during our big family weekend on Sunday 30 March at 3pm. 

Your talk at the festival promises to take us on a journey across the galaxy, but if you could go anywhere in space, where would you go and why? 

I’d need some sort of very futuristic spaceship, but I’d love to get up close with a black hole. Their immense gravity would stretch and bend all the starlight around them into a cosmic hall of mirrors, which I think would be amazing to see!  

You’ve just released your first children’s book, Astrophysics for Supervillains. Could you tell us what the book is about and why you wanted to write it? 

The book is about all the fun ways to destroy the world using the power of space science! I decided to write it because after spending years talking to children about astronomy, I noticed they tended to ask pretty morbid questions. Like… what would happen if you pushed someone into a black hole? Or can you blow up the Sun? So I wrote a fun and quirky guide to the Universe to answer all these questions. (I also secretly wanted to write a book that contained as many terrible jokes as possible.) 

Tell us the most surprising thing about space. 

There are too many to count! Maybe the fact that human beings have created spacecraft (Voyager 1 and 2) that have actually left the Solar System? Or the fact that there are black holes out there that weigh billions of times more than our Sun? Or that there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on Earth? Pretty much everything about space is surprising, I think. Which is why I love it so much. 

You used to work as a galaxy evolution researcher, could you tell us what this means and what you researched? 

So, galaxies are giant (and beautiful) clouds made up of hundreds of thousands of millions of stars. Our Milky Way is one of trillions of galaxies in the Universe. “Galaxy evolution” research is basically all about answering the question “how did all these incredible structures form?”. It’s amazing to me that the simple laws of physics, over billions of years, can make a Universe full of these things. I used big telescopes to look at baby galaxies billions of years ago, trying to understand how they formed stars and grew up into modern day things like our Milky Way. 

What’s the one takeaway you would like people to take from your talk? 

That humanity is on the quest to find life in the Universe, which is one of the most cosmically profound scientific questions we’ve ever tackled. Every year we get closer to actually finding out whether we are alone in the Universe! I can’t wait to find out. 

Do you think there is other life out in space somewhere? 

You know, there’s a proper scientific answer to this, which goes “nobody really knows, but we’re working really hard to find out”. Which is true. But if I was to make a bet, I’d say “yes”. We know that there are billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way, and the chemicals of life are spread everywhere throughout the Universe. There’s got to be life out there somewhere! (Intelligent life though? Who knows…) 

If you had one wish for the future of space exploration, what would it be? 

That it carries on! One thing that really makes me sad is reading all those 1960s predictions that by the year 2000 we’d have cities on the Moon, and so on. We all know how that turned out. Nowadays we’re planning to send people to Mars, but I really hope that it actually happens this time, and that we carry on to bigger and better things. Fingers crossed.