About Steve

Vast and beautiful complexes of interstellar gas are where nascent suns first breathe life. These so-called "molecular clouds" (consisting primarily of molecular hydrogen) act as recycling plants, collecting material ejected from stars that have died and using those elements to create the next generation of stars and planets. These clouds come in a range of sizes and can have strikingly different morphologies. They are complicated systems in which a thorough understanding of fluid dynamics (including turbulence, shock waves, and shears), supernova explosions, magnetic fields, chemistry, and gravitational collapse mechanisms is necessary to describe them fully. There are numerous open questions between the time in which older stars die and newer stars form. While many of these enticing mysteries are low hanging fruit ready to be plucked in this burgeoning field; other conundrums will provide years of work to come.

We're writing an origin story with the laws of physics as our guide.

Believe it or not, this type of research is very pertinent to our lives today here on the Earth. Although we look at systems that are thousands of light years from Earth (and even far-off galaxies!) to get clues, we are really looking at our very own history. Because time lines are so long in space compared to our lives, we are essentially looking at still images of the heavens when we really need a movie... However, movies are made from a series of still images put into a logical order. Time lines in space may be long, but space is also very, VERY big. Therefore, we can see several different images scattered across the sky of different stars at different times during the process of their birth. By taking these pictures and organising them in an order that makes sense we can tell the story of not only how those stars out there are forming, but how our very own sun and Earth came to be. It is truly a great privelege to be able to significantly contribute to the question of our own existence.

The pictures we take are of the densest regions of molecular clouds, namely: cores. We take them using telescopes and detectors which operate at a variety of wavelength ranges, though most commonly we use the infrared, submillimeter, and radio bands. To organise these pictures into a sequence, we apply the laws of physics to each frame in the movie and we create simulations which we can compare with the sky and refine over time until our understanding is sufficiently advanced.

Hawaii is the world's best place to build telescopes. Maunakea is the tallest mountain in the world (not the highest, though), which means that much of the land near the summit is generally above the clouds, so we get clear skies a lot. In addition, it is the atmosphere that makes stars twinkle... but astronomers don't like that because they want the stars to stay still so they can study them. Situated in the middle of the pacific ocean, nice, smooth laminar winds cause less disturbances in the atmosphere and it is easier to correct for the dancing, restless light when it reaches our cameras. Furthermore, there is often less than 2 millimetres of water vapour between our telescopes and space. This is critcal when performing observations of clouds of gas and dust in the Milky Way (where stars are born) because too much water will obscure our data completely (so there is no way we could observe with the JCMT at sea level!). Finally, with our poisition near the equator, we can see vast amounts of both the northern and southern hemisphere which increases the number of targets we can study along with other telescopes all over the world. There really is no place better on Earth.

Yes! Astronomy is one of those wonderful sciences where our research is made public for all to read about and ask questions. Visit the vast arXiv of publications if you want to find out more - or check out my own list of publications by clicking here!