Dr. Abigail Polin -- Astrophysics Q & A #2
Jan 1, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min · 13 segments
What's the deal with black holes?
- Speakers
- Paul DuffellHost
Abigail PolinGuest
Jan 1, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min · 13 segments
What's the deal with black holes?
Abigail PolinGuestBut also I would like to talk about what's been going on with us in research over the past year.
Obviously, it's hard to do as much research in a year where you have a child, you have your first child.
And so it's hard to get as much done, but of course our students are still hard at work.
But for the most part, my students are interested right now in some of these mysteries that are being revealed by JWST observations.
So we've talked about JWST in your podcast several times, the fairly new space telescope that's allowing the fields of science to look further into the infrared and into dimmer objects.
So in supernovae, a lot of the times this looks like looking at supernovae significantly after they exploded.
So in other words, so you're saying looking into the infrared, that's what the James Webb Telescope does, but then why does that mean looking, you're saying that supernovae, that translates to looking at it much later? No.
notoriously difficult from the ground because a huge part of it, the infrared wavelengths, are blocked by interference from our sky.
And so we're limited on ground-based telescopes in the infrared to pretty bright objects.
So for supernovae, we're very excited to have a space-based telescope that allows us to look at things that are dimmer, which means things that are older in supernovae, right? They've been fading for longer.
So if it's dimmer, first of all, it can mean much further away, but also it can mean, yeah, you can follow the supernova for longer because as it gets dimmer and dimmer, you can see what it does after.
And for supernovae, the longer you watch them, the more interior to the explosion you get to see because the outer layers, as they expand, become more transparent.
But also I would like to talk about what's been going on with us in research over the past year.
Obviously, it's hard to do as much research in a year where you have a child, you have your first child.
And so it's hard to get as much done, but of course our students are still hard at work.
But for the most part, my students are interested right now in some of these mysteries that are being revealed by JWST observations.
So we've talked about JWST in your podcast several times, the fairly new space telescope that's allowing the fields of science to look further into the infrared and into dimmer objects.
So in supernovae, a lot of the times this looks like looking at supernovae significantly after they exploded.
So in other words, so you're saying looking into the infrared, that's what the James Webb Telescope does, but then why does that mean looking, you're saying that supernovae, that translates to looking at it much later? No.
notoriously difficult from the ground because a huge part of it, the infrared wavelengths, are blocked by interference from our sky.
And so we're limited on ground-based telescopes in the infrared to pretty bright objects.
So for supernovae, we're very excited to have a space-based telescope that allows us to look at things that are dimmer, which means things that are older in supernovae, right? They've been fading for longer.
So if it's dimmer, first of all, it can mean much further away, but also it can mean, yeah, you can follow the supernova for longer because as it gets dimmer and dimmer, you can see what it does after.
And for supernovae, the longer you watch them, the more interior to the explosion you get to see because the outer layers, as they expand, become more transparent.
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