Believe it or not, someone who studies astronomy can do many different things. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), universities, private companies, and observatories around the world, have a broad range of projects that can interest astronomers.
Although you might think that astronomers or astrophysicists pursuing a doctoral degree want only to do research, sometimes that is not the case. Also, many positions usually require doing extra work besides research, like teaching or supporting functional work for a mission. This functional work can be things like developing an instrument, working on the design of a detector, and defining and writing algorithms to calibrate data. It also can require support for the development of archives, databases, or tools to access data produced by a mission.
Credits Timothy Archibald, Eddy Perez (LSU), STScI, Kholood Eid (SA)
In some cases, astronomy, astrophysics, or physics graduates take regular jobs in research institutions as soon as they finish their Bachelor's degree. Although these positions usually do not include research time, these are a wonderful opportunity to learn a great deal about instrumentation, software development for science missions, and other research areas. It is also an opportunity for some people to figure out if they want to pursue a doctorate in astronomy or continue their studies in another career in a related technical field. These positions are also available to people with doctoral degrees who want to focus fully on technology development rather than astronomical research. There is nothing wrong with that, and many of the people who have taken that path are happy with the choices they made.
Here, I will give you examples of four colleagues working at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Each with an astronomy background and now with different positions at STScI, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and part of the science that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will take. Learning about them will give you an idea of the kind of work you could do if you study astronomy or astrophysics.
Dr. Emily Rickman [https://www.stsci.edu/stsci-research/research-directory/emily-rickman], from England, is an astronomer and Science Operations Scientist working for the European Space Agency (ESA) at STScI in Baltimore, MD. Emily has a Ph.D. and does very cool research on exoplanets and brown dwarf stars; however, she also works, at least half of her time, supporting the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), which is the most sophisticated spectrograph of HST. Due to her work with exoplanets, Emily is quite knowledgeable about astrometry and choronagraphy, two areas key to STIS’s science. Emily also collaborates with other members of the STIS team to develop tools that support the science community. At AAS #242, Emily had a poster focused on STIS. The poster talked about Jupyter Notebooks, written in Python, that the team offers to help scientists improve the calibration of their images. The poster also talked about the new Exposure Time Calculator, which scientists will use in future observing cycles to plan STIS observations.
Daniel Stapleton, who has a Bachelor in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Maryland, has been working at STScI for over a year now. While in college, he worked processing data of regions around young stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Now, he works as a Science Support Analyst, spending almost all his time working for the STIS team. At the AAS, Daniel told us about one of his projects, which monitors the sensitivity of all the STIS observing modes to determine how these behave over time. He explained how the team is verifying that the stars, used to measure the sensitivity, are not variable; something that could lead to incorrect predictions on how the sensitivity of the detectors changes with time. Knowing the sensitivity is very important, as it allows us to determine the amount of light the detectors capture and how it translates to the real brightness of the observed objects. For this project, as well as other projects, Daniel has to develop software that speeds up the analysis of these images and allows the team to easily monitor the observations and ensure the correct working order of the instruments.
Sierra Gomez, is also a Science Support Analyst at STScI, working with the other spectrograph on board of HST, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). After obtaining her Bachelor's in Astronomy and Physics in 2022 at the University of Massachusetts, Sierra joined STScI. While in college, Sierra was involved in several research projects, like taking images of T-Tauri stars and spectroscopic observations of accreting brown dwarfs. While working on these projects, Sierra had to process the data and write a pipeline to process some of them. She is now using these skills to support the COS team. Sierra is still considering going back to school and pursuing a Doctorate in Astronomy; but for now, she is enjoying the work she does for the COS team, like writing Jupyter notebooks to analyze COS data. At the AAS, Sierra gave an update on the status of the detectors in COS and recommendations for scientists on how to use them. COS is a great instrument for obtaining high-sensitivity, medium- and low-resolution spectroscopy of astronomical objects in ultraviolet light. Its detectors, however, evolve with time, so the team follows their evolution closely to ensure astronomers extract the best science possible, while the COS team at STScI can ensure their health and proper use.
Another member of the STScI community is Dr. Javier Sanchez, from Lorca, Spain. He is an Associate Astronomer for ESA working at STScI. Similarly to Emily, Javier divides his work between science and functional work, in this case, working with the team supporting the Science Operations Center (SOC) for the future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman for short). Javier’s research expertise, which focuses on observational cosmology, trying to figure out if dark energy corresponds to the cosmological constant or if it evolves across cosmic time, relates to one of the key science goals of Roman, making him a great asset to the team. The other key themes of the observatory are to determine what dark matter is, and to search for and take images of exoplanets. At the AAS, Javier presented a poster describing Roman and what he and the STScI team are doing for the project. He provided information about the mission’s observation scheduling system and the data processing system for the imaging mode in the Wide Field Instrument. He also talked about other tools they are developing to support the mission’s SOC and the STScI archive, which will be storing all the data from Roman.
As you can see, there are many things that you can do with an astronomy degree. It is not only about research but also about actively participating in quite important and cool missions. You can be involved in the design of instruments, the systems to support space and ground missions, and even writing software to calibrate and analyze data. One thing you might have realized by now is that knowing how to develop software is critical for an astronomer. Most times, they need to write code to process and analyze large amounts of data, or to understand how to use and contribute to code other teams write to support their research. Most recently, we have heard how astronomers are using Machine Learning to analyze images. Given that the telescope Roman will take a large amount of images in a short period of time, this might be a great way to extract a lot of interesting information from its data.