Profile

Neutron stars are very small, very dense objects formed when massive stars come to the end of their lives. They are about the mass of the sun but have a radius of only 10km or so. Because they are so small and dense, they have an incredibly strong gravitational field which means the physics concerning neutron stars can get pretty interesting (often involving general relativity).

Type I X-ray bursts are explosions which occur on the surfaces of some of these neutron stars. It is believed the explosion begins in a spot in the liquid surface layer (or ‘ocean’), before rapidly spreading across the entire surface, burning as it goes. By modelling this, we can infer neutron star properties such as radius and magnetic field, which are difficult to measure directly (because neutron stars are so small and so far away) but are crucial for understanding the stars’ interior physics. My work involves investigating how this burning spreads across the surface.

My days at work are mainly spent doing three things: reading scientific papers, coding and drinking coffee.

As a PhD student, you still have a lot to learn, so there is a seemingly endless supply of papers to read so you can learn about what other people have already done in your field.

My PhD involves modelling physical systems using a computer. To do this, I work on writing my own code and adapting existing code to my project (primarily in Python and Fortran with the odd dash of C/C++). Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a programmer must spend approximately 95% of their time debugging, so a large part of this time is spent trying to figure out why my code is not doing what I want it to and attempting to remedy this. When my code does work, it can produce pretty images of swirling fluid like this:

I fuel my reading and coding by drinking a lot of coffee (spot the espresso machine next to my desk in the photo below!).

When I’m not doing science / drinking coffee, I sing in a choir, play guitar, bake/eat lots of cake, attempt to learn languages (currently French, German and Welsh) and have recently started taekwondo. I also somehow find the time to watch plenty of Netflix.