Earth Conservation x Space Exploration

An interactive event hosted by the School of Physics at UNSW in celebration of the 2023 National Science Week

What’s more important: Earth’s conservation or space exploration? It’s a tough question, and one explored in this interactive event. Attendees had the chance to learn about renewable energy and the physics that connects us to the cosmos, or the incredible space technology that allows us to glimpse into space and understand how it works.

Maria Pettyjohn (UNSW PhD student in the McKemmish group) and I ran the Astro Spectroscopy stand.

Astro Spectroscopy

Attendees engaged in the quest for searching for life beyond Earth using spectroscopy. Particularly, attendees were exposed to how astronomers use electronic and infrared spectroscopy for searching for signals of life in the Universe. There were 100+ people engaged.

Electronic Spectroscopy

We had spectra tubes containing sodium (Na), oxygen (O2), mercury (Hg), and nitrogen (N2). The attendees used diffraction glasses to see the different spectral lines that came up from the different tubes.

Using item barcodes as an analogy, our goal was to highlight how spectroscopy gives us molecular/atomic "barcodes" that we can use to find species in space.

Infrared Spectroscopy

Using the recent atmospheric spectrum of WASP-39b (a hot-Jupiter exoplanet) recorded from the James Webb Space Telescope, we created an interactive Python Jupyter notebook to unveil the chemical composition of the atmosphere of this planet.

Attendees engaged by using this notebook to select different molecular infrared spectra that fitted with the atmospheric spectrum of WASP-39b.

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