Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock talks exoplanets, public engagement and citizen science

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, MBE, space scientist and all round science communication heroine talks exoplanets, public engagement and why astronomy is for everyone

A lot has been achieved in the last 12 months in space exploration – we landed on a comet, we reached Pluto, we discovered the first Earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like star. What do you think is next in line? This is a really exciting time and finding Earth-like planets is quite intriguing, so I’m finding this incredibly exciting. I mean the whole area of exoplanets is very exciting and the fact that we can track planets hanging around other stars. What astronomers are hoping for in the future is, with the technology we’ve got, to perhaps look at the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets. It would be absolutely amazing if we could find chemicals that don’t occur naturally in the atmosphere because then, as critical as it is, there might be intelligent life out there. So I don’t know how quickly that is going to catch on but it could happen in the future.

 How long do you think that’s going to take? Well, we have the basic technology to do it and our technology is getting better and better all the time as we’ve got bigger and better telescopes. It’s a matter of probability. How likely is there to be intelligent life in our galaxy? And is it close enough for us to attain? It might be that we’ll never do it because there might be intelligent life too far away. Or we might make the discovery tomorrow.

One of the projects I have worked on in recent years is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With the Hubble space telescope, we made amazing discoveries about the size and diversity of our Universe and now the JWST will mainly be working on infrared light — and we can make amazing discoveries with that. That’s meant to be launched in the next three or four years. So when it is launched we’ll get new insights of the Universe. I’m incredibly proud to be part of team working on it.

What are you working on at the moment? I’m working on a number of projects at the moment. One of the things I’m very keen on is getting everybody interested in science in general, but especially in astronomy. As a result I’m doing things I don’t usually do. I’m a regular presenter on ‘Sky at Night’ but as well as that I’m doing a science comedy programme. I also take part in an antique show where I’m sort of looking at telescopes and things like that. So I’m trying to get the science and the astronomy out in different forums so that anyone can enjoy it and appreciate it.

How did you decide to get involved in the field of space science? Actually, for me I think got the buzz when I was really young. There was this television programme I used to watch when I was little called Planet. There were these little puppets that lived on a planet in space. I now watch it with my daughter.

Do you have any advice for someone wanting to get started in this area? My advice would be get outside and look up. Astronomy is one of those subjects that you could do with no equipment at all. All you need are your eyeballs. Actually strangely enough even if you can’t see, people have relief images which you can touch with your hands. So astronomy truly is for everybody. Astronomy is a place where amateurs really make a real difference to the community – they can actually see something and inform professionals.