What area of astronomy do you specialize in?
I'm an astrochemist. Because we can get information about the universe not just from physics, but there is actually a surprisingly complicated chemistry up there as well. We have seen maybe one hundred and fifty different molecules up there. And they're everything from carbon dioxide, is quite common. And molecules that you might be interested in, for example, alcohol has been found in the star forming regions, and the Orion nebula I was talking about earlier, there's about a pint of alcohol. So, if only we could gather it, then that'd be useful. But there's a serious point here, because knowing that tells us about the conditions in those clouds. It gives us a huge amount of information. And one of the things we have found out is that chemistry goes a surprisingly long way. We form large organic molecules. Now, organic doesn't mean life bearing, it means large trains involving carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on. And those are the building blocks of life. And if our theories are right, we've gotten as far as producing amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins, in the star forming regions. If that's true, they're already there, when planets form. Which means life already has a head start, if they end up on a surface like the earth. We've got a long way towards producing life, even before the planet has formed. So I think, trying to understand that sequence of events is key. We need to do the whole thing. If you want to understand why there is life on earth, or even why there is intelligent life on earth, you need to understand how the universe began, you need to understand how galaxies formed, how stars formed within that, how planets form around those stars, how rocky planets form, and then what happened on the surface. My chemical models, and those of all the other astrochemists can cover almost that whole span, and give us a whole wealth of information about each stage in that process.
