INTERVIEW: Press Gang talk space with Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith

Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith is an award-winning astrophysicist, author and Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador.

Where does a person go if they go into a black hole?

I’m going to have a crack with this question by explaining first what a black hole is and then what happens when you go in one.

A black hole is basically an area of space, a bit like a star where there’s a load of material like gas, but it’s crushed down into a really tiny space – smaller than the pinhead – like a full stop. And it’s the amount of gas that’s in a star. It’s collapsed down because gravity pulls things together and at the end of a star’s life, it pulls it together and creates this tiny, tiny black hole. And gravity is really, really strong in this area. So nothing can escape the black hole, even light.

So if you get too close, the gravitational pull, which is like the gravity we feel on earth to keep us on the ground, that’s really, really strong. So what happens is if you were flying down this way towards the black hole with your feet down and your head up, your body would stretch and squeeze and get longer and longer because the gravitational pull on your feet was so much stronger than the gravity on your head. 

So you’d stretch out into noodles, we call this spaghettification, you turn into spaghetti and then you fall into the black hole. Nothing really happens when you fall in. It just means you disappear and you get squished down into a tiny point, like a full stop basically. You don’t want to go near a black hole

What does an astrophysicist do?

An astrophysicist is a scientist who studies space. And so I became an astrophysicist by getting interested in space, looking up at the stars with my dad when I was young, going to astronomy clubs and looking through telescopes and all these cool things, reading hundreds of books about astronomy. And I studied physics and maths and science, chemistry, things like that. 

And became an astrophysicist professionally. And what that means is that you come up with ideas by reading lots and lots of things about space and ideas of things that we don’t yet know.

We might understand how a star shines, but we might not understand fully how it is destroyed at the end of its life. Or we might understand some things about gravity. But when we get to tiny, tiny scales like smaller than atoms, we don’t really understand what’s going on there. 

So we find things we don’t understand and we design experiments like you might do at school to figure out what’s going on. And it’s all about communication with other scientists, sharing your ideas, and working together. It’s about using giant telescopes in my case to study space. And it’s all about sharing the knowledge that you’ve learned using maths and computers and programming and coding to discover things. 

And then in my case, writing and speaking to people to share the amazing stuff we’ve discovered. So it’s a really fun career and there’s lots of different parts to it and lots of different people who do astrophysics around the world and we all collaborate. So it’s a very international type of science. 

Do you have to be good, to be good at maths, to study space?

You don’t have to be good at maths. Nobody’s magically good at maths. When I was at school, I didn’t really like maths, I didn’t dislike maths. It was okay, but you don’t have to be a genius, you have to just work at it. 

That’s really important to know because some people think scientists are just naturally good at maths, but that’s not the case. You have to work at maths and you have to work at lots of other things as well, like communication and working as a team. So there are lots of different things you need to be good at to be a scientist. 

What inspired you to write children’s books about space? 

So I’ve written 10 children’s books already and what inspired me really was when I was young that I was reading books about astronomy and they gave me this sense of something out there, something magical, something huge and amazing and exciting in space. Things like the infinite universe, black holes, exploding stars, all the mysteries that we don’t know about, is there life out there? All those big questions. 

So I never really considered myself a writer, but I read so many books as a young person that really inspired me. And when I got to be a professional astronomer as an adult, I thought I could use that excitement and the knowledge that I’ve learned and share it with other people, especially young people. So I’ve written a couple of books for adults, but I prefer writing for kids because you are cooler. 

Why is it important to learn about space?

So from things like [music and history], you can learn different perspectives on the world. So music is more about inspiration and emotion and feeling and it lifts your soul I think. And history teaches us what’s happened and maybe we can make the future better by learning from it. 

Learning about space is similar to both of those things I think because it both gives us a sense of our history in the universe because we came about from the Big Bang and then all the chemicals created in space eventually became us on the planet Earth. Chemical reactions created life. That’s how we think we came about. 

And it also teaches us about the future and the big forces in play. So what will happen in the future with the earth? What will happen with things like the sun when it ends and what will happen even beyond there?

And it also teaches us about forces and enables us to invent things like computers and cameras and communication. If you’ve watched any sporting event or any news, it relies on satellites that are above the earth to actually beam those signals around the earth. So if you’re watching the Matildas play in the World Cup, for example, you are actually watching signals beamed from the stadium up into space and back down to your lounge room where your TV is. 

So all of that stuff uses technology we’ve invented through science and knowing about space.

It’s important because it inspires us. It teaches us about history and the future and how we became who we are today. And it helps us to develop ways to communicate with each other. So I think it’s really useful to understand all those different things. 

And then if you’re a politician, you would say it’s important because it creates jobs and lots of people have jobs with space technologies and science. So there are lots and lots of reasons why space is important.

Do you believe that there’s life outside the solar system?

Interesting you ask that because I wrote a whole book about aliens and other worlds, and the short answer is that we don’t know. 

But what we do know is that the conditions exist on other planets that could possibly host life. And we also know that there are trillions and a trillion is a thousand billion. There are trillions of planets out there in the universe. 

So if most of those planets have chemicals similar to the earth, like the atmosphere has carbon dioxide in it and nitrogen and oxygen and the planets have things like methane and water and all the different chemicals that we are made of and that the earth has that there’ll be some combination out there where life has begun. 

We keep looking and we use our telescopes to study the atmospheres and the chemistry of space and other planets. And we also use our telescopes to listen out for signals that if other planets are beaming out radio signals to communicate with each other, or if they’re watching TV or if they’re beaming out satellite signals for some reason, then we’ll see them. 

So we’re listening and studying and one day we might find something. It would be pretty exciting, wouldn’t it? Probably the most exciting discovery ever made, I think. Let’s hope they’re friendly. But the main thing is most planets are too far away to travel to anyway. So I don’t think anyone would be traveling here to earth.