Question: What makes your peticular chosen science so interesting apart from being fun?

Maggie Lieu answered on 16 Nov 2017:

So in astrophysics, what I am doing specifically is trying to figure out the cosmological parameters. These are a set of numbers, that if you know them then you can describe the entire Universe, its a past and its future. These numbers include, how fast the Universe is expanding, how much dark matter there is and how much dark energy there is.

Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the Universe. That means everything that we see around us and can touch is a tiny amount of the entire Universe. At the moment we’re not even sure if dark matter is real or not because we can’t see it and we haven’t detected it yet! But we think its there because the gravity of dark matter is so strong that it can bend the light of distant galaxies. By measuring the shapes of galaxies in the sky we can figure out where the dark matter in the Universe is and how much of it there is.

I think my research is really interesting because dark matter is passing through us right now and we can’t feel or see it. But I can measure where it is and help us learn about the origin and fate of the Universe.