Becky Smethurst | |
---|---|
Born | Rebecca Jane Smethurst |
Citizenship | British |
Education | Bolton School Girls' Division |
Alma mater |
|
Known for | A Brief History of Black Holes |
Awards |
|
Scientific career | |
Fields | Supermassive black hole evolution |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The influence of morphology, AGN and environment on the quenching histories of galaxies (2017) |
Doctoral advisor | Chris Lintott |
YouTube information | |
Channel | |
Years active | 2015–present |
Genre(s) | Science outreach (Astronomy and astrophysics) |
Subscribers | 600 thousand [1] |
Total views | 54.90 million [1] |
Contents are in | Northern English English (Lancashire accent) [2] |
Associated acts | Sixty Symbols (as an anchor) [3] [4] Royal Astronomical Society (as co-creator of The Supermassive Podcast ) [5] |
Last updated: 12 July 2023 | |
Website | rebeccasmethurst |
Rebecca Smethurst, also known as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and YouTuber who is a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow [6] at the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Award "for research by a post-doctoral fellow in Astronomy whose career has shown the most promising development".
As a researcher, Smethurst studies the role that supermassive black holes play in inhibiting different types of galaxies from forming stars. She is a member of the Galaxy Zoo collaboration, run by her doctoral advisor, Chris Lintott. Smethurst hosts her own YouTube channel, called Dr. Becky, where she posts science communication videos related to astronomy research and amateur astronomy. She has also written two popular science books, titled Space: 10 Things You Should Know and A Brief History of Black Holes.
While growing up, Smethurst attended the Bolton School Girls' Division for a decade, from 1998 through 2008. She received a first-class master's degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Durham in 2012. After taking a year off from academic studies, Smethurst began pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Oxford, with Chris Lintott as her supervisor. She earned her doctorate in 2017 with a thesis titled "The influence of morphology, AGN and environment on the quenching histories of galaxies". [7] [8]
Smethurst was an Ogden Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham before returning to the University of Oxford in late 2018 as a junior research fellow. [7] [9] She studies the interaction between galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centres, specifically focusing on if and how these black holes can quench the process of star formation in their surrounding galaxies. Her research involves using statistical methods to analyse large datasets of galaxies obtained through Galaxy Zoo and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, including the development of several open-source software programs for analytics of large astronomy data sets. [10]
One of her research findings is showing that galaxies in the green valley that do not fit in with normal red elliptical or blue spiral galaxies can be used as a means to probe how and when star formation quenching occurs. [7] [11] [12] Smethurst won the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, an award given by the Herschel Society through the Royal Astronomical Society, with the goal of "supporting promising female astronomers early in their careers". [11] [13]
Smethurst began creating science communication videos when she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham for the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel, run by Brady Haran and the university's physics department. [4] She also has appeared on Deep Sky Videos, another channel operated by Haran on the theme of astronomy. [14] Smethurst launched her own YouTube channel, eponymously titled Dr. Becky, in late 2018, on which she posts weekly videos related primarily to astronomy research and occasionally on amateur astronomy. [15] These include a monthly series called Night Sky News, in which she discusses events amateurs might observe in the night sky during the month, as well as recent research developments in astronomy. [16] She has also published a book, titled Space: 10 Things You Should Know, which was named one of Sky at Night Magazine's 23 best space and astronomy books of 2019. [14] [17]
Smethurst received the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, an award given "for exceptional early career contributions to public engagement in physics", winning specifically for "engaging a diverse, global audience with complex astrophysical ideas presented at an accessible level with a large dose of enthusiasm on the YouTube channel Dr. Becky". [18] [19] Smethurst hosts The Supermassive Podcast together with journalist Izzie Clarke. [5] [20] The show, produced by the Royal Astronomical Society focuses on astronomy and related research. [21]
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is a learned society and charity that encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. Its headquarters are in Burlington House, on Piccadilly in London. The society has over 4,000 members, known as fellows, most of whom are professional researchers or postgraduate students. Around a quarter of Fellows live outside the UK.
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. By identifying the galaxy rotation problem, her work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. These results were later confirmed over subsequent decades.
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
Andrea Mia Ghez is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Messier 58 is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy with a weak inner ring structure located within the constellation Virgo, approximately 68 million light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by Charles Messier on April 15, 1779 and is one of four barred spiral galaxies that appear in Messier's catalogue. M58 is one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. From 1779 it was arguably the farthest known astronomical object until the release of the New General Catalogue in the 1880s and even more so the publishing of redshift values in the 1920s.
Christopher John Lintott is a British astrophysicist, author and broadcaster. He is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and since 2023 is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. Lintott is involved in a number of popular science projects aimed at bringing astronomy to a wider audience and is also the primary presenter of the BBC television series The Sky at Night, having previously been co-presenter with Patrick Moore until Moore's death in 2012. He co-authored Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe and The Cosmic Tourist with Moore and Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May.
Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research.
Roger David Blandford, FRS, FRAS is a British theoretical astrophysicist, best known for his work on black holes.
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
Gerhart "Gerry" Neugebauer was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work in infrared astronomy.
Marek Janusz Kukula is a British astronomer and an author of works on popular science. After gaining a PhD in radio astronomy from the University of Manchester in 1994, he specialised in studying distant galaxies. As his research reached the limits of telescopes, he moved into the field of public engagement. In 2008 he was appointed Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly in gravitational lensing and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, and academia more generally.
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Red nuggets is the nickname given to rare, unusually small galaxies packed with large amounts of red stars that were originally observed by Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 in the young universe. They are ancient remnants of the first massive galaxies. The environments of red nuggets are usually consistent with the general elliptical galaxy population. Most red nuggets have merged with other galaxies, but some managed to stay unscathed.
Rita M. Sambruna Commander OMRI (Hon) is an Italian-American astrophysicist and is the Deputy Director of the Astrophysics Science Division at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center. From September 2022 to May 2023, she was the Acting Deputy Director of the Science Exploration Directorate at Goddard. Rita held the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University in 2000-2005.
In astronomy, quenching is a process in which a galaxy loses cold gas, thus strongly suppressing star formation, because stars are formed from nebulae are formed from accumulated interstellar gas in the interstellar medium (ISM). Evidence suggests that active supermassive black holes drive the process. One common evolutionary path on the galaxy color–magnitude diagram may start with a blue spiral galaxy with much star formation. The black hole at its center may start growing rapidly, and somehow start quenching the galaxy, which relatively quickly transitions through the "green valley", ending up more red.
James Moran is an American radio astronomer living in Massachusetts, USA. He was a professor of Astronomy at Harvard University from 1989 through 2016, a senior radio astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1981 through 2020 and the director of the Submillimeter Array during its construction and early operational phases from 1995 through 2005. In 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 to the American Philosophical Society. He is currently the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics, Emeritus, at Harvard University.