There's something mysterious which draws us in to looking up at a night sky. As kids, many of us might have spent nights marveling at the speckled lights above us, as if they were holes in the sky. Well there was a whole week dedicated to celebrating just that - happy International Dark Sky Week folks!

I was so excited to have the opportunity to interview Professor Emma Bunce. Professor Bunce is an accomplished space scientist and professor at the University of Leicester - and it only takes a quick peek at some of her accomplishments to date to see she's a #bosslady.

After a few technical difficulties getting our video interview going - "A year later and this technology is still difficult for everyone!", Professor. Bunce joked - we dove in.

It would be great to hear what got you started in your career, going back to what first got you interested in the sciences or in astronomy specifically?

Professor Bunce: So I’ve told this story a few times… never to you of course, but when I was young, I always liked school and liked learning things generally. When I got to secondary school, that developed into me knowing I enjoyed subjects involving maths and science.

For as long as I can possibly remember, I’ve always been interested in just looking up at the sky and just wondering… what was going on up there? What was I looking at? I can remember that looking at the moon was something that I really enjoyed doing. My first telescope was really small and from the Argos catalogue, very basic, but it allowed me to just look at the moon and it was mind blowing to me.

“I’ve always been interested in just looking up in the sky, looking up at the moon, looking up at the night sky and just wondering… what was going on up there?!

So I always knew that I was interested in maths and science and yes, I knew that I had an interest in looking up at the night sky, looking at the moon, etc.. And then, when I was a little bit older, probably around 14, the Voyager spacecraft encountered Neptune in 1989. And I suppose to some extent, I was starting to think a bit about what I wanted to do.

*Image of Neptune taken by Voyager spacecraft - NASA*

There was a BBC program that was on the TV about the new data coming back from Neptune with images of this planet which we had never really seen before - and I just thought “wow this is beautiful”.

On the program, there was a room full of scientists who were really excitedly gathered around the computer looking at these images of Neptune, and it struck me as not only really exciting, but it was the first time that I really connected it with being a job. That it was someone’s job! To get these images back from Neptune for the first time and to be the first people to see these images and to do whatever they did next… which at this point, I had no idea what that was that they were doing.

So after that, it really enthused me and inspired me to pursue that possibility… to even dare to think that it was a possibility. So I wrote a letter to NASA and just said “I’d really love to work for you”. I just thought at 14 that I’ll just do whatever I want. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but something along those lines of “This is amazing, I really want to do this type of job”.

“So I wrote a letter to NASA and just said ‘I’d really love to work for you’!”

And the really great thing is NASA being NASA, they wrote back and sent me lots of advice and all these little career leaflets about what I should do next and what I should study at university. And you’ve got to remember… this was a long time ago, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have phones… this was exciting! To write a letter to NASA and get a response was pretty huge, and they pointed me in the right direction of studying physics and maths in university. So I was like “right” and just went off on that path.

Wow that’s incredible! As most people do in their careers, did you face any challenges or difficulties along the way?

Yes, it’s a great question, and like you said, everyone faces challenges in what they want to do and faces challenges generally in life. I was just this nobody from nowhere, in this regular state school in the south of England, nobody in my family had even done A-levels, so this was new territory. I remember saying to my mum that I’d really like to study physics and space in university and you could see her thinking “Well that’s great, I have no idea, but that’s great”.

“I was just a kid from the south coast and had no experience of anything to do with university or academia or anything like that.”

So in terms of obstacles, I guess it’s fair to say that I wasn’t really the best student in the class. It was really a great deal of determination and focus that got me on that path. I didn’t feel that I was the strongest student, wasn’t the most confident - and still true - person. So it was a big ask of myself to go on and do arguably one of the most difficult degree subjects, and just throw myself in there and see what happens.

And it was hard, I’d be absolutely lying if I told you it was plain sailing. It was really, really difficult and I struggled with really difficult subjects but I received lots of support from the university that I went to. I was not from an obvious background that would send me in that direction, in the sense that no one in my immediate family had studied the sciences. I was just a kid from the south coast and had no experience of anything to do with university or academia or anything like that.

What do you like most about doing the work you do? What’s something that really excites you?

This is a really good question because I think that obviously, the science itself is what really drives us.

We think about future missions - I’ve helped to develop a future mission to Jupiter which is going to Ganymede (Jupiter’s largest moon), being launched next year called The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). It will orbit Ganymede, and will tell us more about the moon, which we think has an ocean underneath the icy crust surface.

In fact, we think there are oceans underneath the icy surfaces of the moons in the outer solar system, which opens up a whole new possibility in terms of potential for life outside our planet. So the science definitely drives us on in that sense, and the questions that science throws up are definitely key in keeping us going.

But I also think there is something else for me personally - I work in a university and teach undergraduates. I think it’s really important for us to be able to bring the research we do into the classroom so we can inspire the next generation of scientists. I’d like to think that over the years, I can inspire one or two versions of me that would consider studying science and using their brains to push science forward and undertake any kind of maths and science training in the future.

As well as just the excitement, that excitement of unpacking your data for the first time and being perhaps the first person on the planet to see something that nobody else has seen, it’s pretty cool.

Okay, final question. What advice would you give to both young students who are looking to go into the sciences and also adults who are interested in learning casually more about the cosmos and space?

Yeah okay, good questions! So I guess for students who think they might be interested in actually pursuing physics or maths or going into that direction - stick with it, I think that’s an important one. Because it is difficult, it is challenging and most people find it hard. So, if you do struggle a little bit, you’re not alone in that, and a good deal of perseverance is actually required to get through.

“Stick with it… Because it is difficult, it is challenging and most people find it hard. So if you do struggle… you’re not alone in that.”

And I think for girls in particular I think sometimes there’s this temptation to think that certain subjects are for girls and certain subjects are for boys. I really hope we’re moving past that but I still get the impression that we’re not there yet. There’s still a disparity in the number of girls who go on to do physics A-level. And I think that actually… it never occurred to me that it wasn’t for me, because I was a woman.

We have to kind of put all of that to one side. Nobody should let anyone tell them that something is not for them because of who they are and that could be male or female or all sorts of other characteristics as well. I personally feel very strongly about that.

|“Nobody should let anyone tell them that something is not for them because of who they are.”

And as for adults wanting to get into it, I think there are so many good popular science books and things like podcasts. I spent a lot of time in the past year in lockdown listening to podcasts. Actually, the Royal Astronomical Society has a podcast as well. It’s called Super Massive and it’s really, really good. So for people who are just interested in listening to a little bit about what’s going on in current research but in a really accessible way and things like what to look out for in the current sky, then that’s a really good podcast.

Thank you so much to Professor Emma Bunce for such a lovely chat. You can read more about Professor Emma Bunce and her research here and check out the Super-Massive Podcast here as well.

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Written by Ratuja Reddy

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