Profile

I work as an astronomer, trying to find out more about the universe. It can be very slow work sometimes, but we have nearly 14 billion years of history to unravel. So ask me anything about astronomy, physics or science in general

I start with what we think the universe was like in the early days and then apply the laws of physics, and let it run in a very big computer, then look at what we’ve got and see if its like what we see.

We have to match up galaxies, stars, super nova, black holes and all sorts of other objects, and compare it to information we get from the big telescopes like the VLT and Hubble space telescope.

Usually I’m running computer programs, or finding out why they are not running.

With super computers you can’t just run a program, as it will typically use anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand processors. So you prepare your program to run, and then submit it to be scheduled. At some later time, when there are enough processors free, it will run your job in between other peoples. It will usually run for a day and then stop and save itself. At this point you can check how it’s going, and if its working out, send it back to run a bit further.

The longest simulations can run for several months.

Once it is finished, you have to analyse the results. This usually means plotting graphs of things to see if they look like you expect. There is far too much data produced to look at the numbers individually.

Then we sometimes make pretty pictures of the data, to show it happening, or movies of it.