The epidemiology of space with Sabine Bellstedt

Michele Ong

A lot about what it is to be human is understanding who we are and where we came from, whether that's genetically, geographically or otherwise. But what if we zoomed out and approached it from a galaxy level? What could we learn about who we are, what we understand about the universe, and what humans are capable of achieving?

Sabine Bellstedt is an astronomer working on the epidemiology of space and on large scale projects with international teams, not only to understand the universe, but how we understand the universe. Join us as we speak with Sabine about her journey to astrophysics, space epidemiology, and the impact of astronomical innovation.

I'm Michele Ong, and this is STEAM Powered.

Michele Ong

Good morning Sabine, thank you so much for joining me on STEAM Powered. I am really looking forward to talking about your journey through astronomy and all the very cool things that you do.

Sabine Bellstedt

Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you having me.

Michele Ong

Ah, that's really amazing.

Sabine's journey to astronomy.

Michele Ong

So we shall get straight into it, and talk about how you got into this space because you did a physics degree, but you managed to work in astronomy into it, so how did that work?

Sabine Bellstedt

Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of astronomers tell the story about how they were fascinated by the night sky and they always wanted to do astronomy, and I think yes, I was always fascinated by the night sky, but that was never my end game and I wanted to be many things, but it really was just the love of the natural sciences in general. And physics is the most fundamental thereof.

Which is why I did that physics degree. I loved it. I was so excited at the prospect that I looked at, at the start of university about quantum mechanics, and electrodynamics, and classical mechanics. There was lots of mechanics involved actually.

And I actually had an Honours project at the very end, so a final year research project lined up in the realm of condensed matter physics. And at the very last minute I thought, you know what? I never got that taste for astronomy, and there was this spectacularly beautiful science out there that I never really got to experience, and so I did. I contacted the lecturer who was most involved in space that I could find, and I said, is there even an opportunity for me to do this?

And she wonderfully got me in touch with, at the time it was the Astronomical, or the Australian Astronomical Observatory, which was a government-run organisation in Sydney who had a lot of scientists that didn't really have access to many students 'cause they weren't an educational institute. And I did a tour of the building and I found an incredible person with whom I could do research project, and that was it. I was hooked. Here I am.

Michele Ong

That is so cool. So, you know, it kind of makes it hard 'cause I was gonna say where did you see yourself in a career in astronomy, but you really didn't until close to the end.

Astronomic serendipity.

Sabine Bellstedt

And you know it's funny, I recently moved houses and that's always a fantastic thing 'cause you find all kinds of things that you've forgotten you owned. And I found a whole box of magnets that a group of friends and I had printed mostly as a joke because there was some company that was selling free magnets and we could all personalise some things.

And this was in the first year of university. And I'd printed off these very ambitious magnets saying "Sabine Bellstedt, Astrophysicist". And I found these magnets and I thought, "I could actually use these now. Who would have thought it?"

Michele Ong

That's incredible.

So what, because you were into magnets, sorry, magnets, physics and all the engineering sort of things, and then you came to the astronomy part, sort of late-ish in your academic kind of journey. What made you choose to put astrophysicist on your magnet?

Sabine Bellstedt

I think it was because astrophysicists have this very prominent view with the public. If you think of the physicist, you think of probably many things–

Michele Ong

They're the fancy ones.

Sabine Bellstedt

Exactly, and they're the ones that get all the screen time because we have pretty pictures of space and we've got the Carl Sagans and the Neil deGrasse Tysons and all these people that are famous, that are astrophysicists.

And I remember at the time thinking, "Oh, that must be the," uh, to use a, you know, crude phrase, "the sexiest science". I, I don't know so that the seed must have been there, but I think most of my brain was thinking, "No, no, no. Be sensible. Broad physics. There's so much that you don't know". And I couldn't quiet that back of the brain that just thought that's that's where it is.

Michele Ong

That's amazing. Like it was just quietly in your subconscious.

Sabine Bellstedt

It really was. Yeah.

Where Sabine thought the future would take her.

Michele Ong

That's so cool. So when you actually did start exploring astronomy, academically and in research, what were your thoughts in where you were gonna take it?

Sabine Bellstedt

I think I had always hoped to stay in the realm of academia and research. I was always a curious child. I come from a family that has quite a few scientists in it, actually. And so that sort of, pursuing just of knowledge and of research was something that was encouraged. And I think, I think my parents joked that I would get a PhD when I was in primary school.

I don't know if that came to fruition because of it.

Michele Ong

They could see it.

Sabine Bellstedt

They really could. And so I, I'd always hoped that I could do something exciting in the realm of research.

Was I prepared to not do that if it didn't work out? Absolutely. I think after my degree, I looked up a whole range of careers that I could have with the Australian Intelligence Agency because I knew was something that–

Michele Ong

Also sexy.

Sabine Bellstedt

Well, maybe most of report writing though.

And it turns out I like chatting too much. So I quickly realised that wasn't the career for me. yeah, so I always knew that there were many different options. But it was that case of just strive for the thing that you're most curious and interested in, and keep an eye out for other opportunities as I go, and that was always my plan.

Michele Ong

Yeah, that's an excellent plan. Like, you're keeping the doors open, but you know, you're just letting that curiosity lead you where you wanna go.

Sabine Bellstedt

Exactly right.

Michele Ong

That's amazing.

The epidemiology of space.

Michele Ong

Okay, so when we first met, you mentioned that what you were working on was the epidemiology of space, and I love that. I love that turn of phrase. It's so cool, but what does that actually mean?

Sabine Bellstedt

It means that we're now in the regime of not just being interested in how does the heart work? How does this particular disease manifest in one particular person? What are the typical hair colours in a small group people?

See, if I liken the analogy to medicine, there are so many things that we learn in detail from a single person, but I think in the post-COVID world, we've all realised that actually learning things in detail in a single person doesn't give you enough overview of what medicine is.

You need to have a really good understanding of something, as an epidemiologist, you know, how did COVID react, not just in a small group of people, but in people with different living conditions, different ages, different sexes, different ethnic backgrounds, you know, a really cohesive overview of humanity as a whole, and that gives you a detailed view of whatever it is you're studying.

Michele Ong

Because we're complex systems.

Sabine Bellstedt

Completely. And that's, I mean, that's exactly the reason why this analogy, I think, works so well is because dealing with the analysis of complex systems, and in space, in physics in general, a lot of the phenomena we're studying are complex systems. And for me, that is galaxies. So I'm an extra-galactic observational astronomer, which means I look at things, that's the observational bit, but the key for me is the extra-galactic and it's specifically galaxies, and there are many of them.

How did they get to be the way they are?

Now we can study individual galaxies of images in great detail, and we do, there are good reasons for that. But to understand why it is that we have, you know, seven orders of magnitude in size that we cover, these things have been evolving for 14 billion years, and we get anything from brightly star-forming systems to massive dead elliptical galaxies and all of our models that try to replicate that in simulations are failing in at least one way.

We've not come up with a single one that just works, right? So there, there are complex things going on here that we just don't understand yet.

And so my small contribution to this problem is to say, well, let's study these galaxies at a statistical level. You know, let's try to describe every element of how they do whatever it is we're studying. Because only when we have that statistical picture, can we see how that mechanism, kind of like a disease in a human, propagates through the population.

The problem of determining which bits of data are important.

Michele Ong

Yeah. You see when you say that, all I'm seeing is mountains and mountains and mountains of data, and how do you decide which are the things which are relevant to be able to kind of go, we need to eliminate or include, or this has more importance than this other thing to figure out what it is that makes those models fail or succeed.

Sabine Bellstedt

It's a really great question that I– the fact that we haven't answered it means that we don't know the answer to that as well as we maybe should. As far as the data that we collect for galaxies, we do the most obvious things first. How big is it? How bright is it? If we have the capacity to do more, we might, you know, measure its colour. That's a pretty fundamental one too, we do that a lot. Then we might get into structure. But first, and when you first try to create a model that that creates the replication of the simplest property, that's often easy to get. Then you say, okay, well we've got a bit of extra capacity now, let's give it an extra property and try to make that work.

And a lot of the time you get down three or four layers and go, oh, now it's broken, but you can't fix it here. You've kind of gotta go backwards and say, well, there's a different way of getting to the answer at the top, so let's try again. And you keep going through these levels.

So as we learn more. We solve exactly this problem. We try to recapture more and more of the properties of these sources. And eventually, hopefully we get to the point that we're more confident that we know what's going on?

Michele Ong

Well, that's the hope I mean.

The significance and impact of large-scale infrastructure projects.

Michele Ong

So, because all of this stuff, like, I guess for a lot of people, the scale of the kind of work that you do with the size of the groups and teams that you work with, especially because this is the kind of large-scale project that you need to pull in so many skillsets, so many countries, so many budgets, to be able to make it all work.

But why is it so important to be able to pull all these teams together, aside from the obvious reasons for you just get more people?

Sabine Bellstedt

Definitely more people is critical. I have seen small groups of people do incredible work with large infrastructure, but there are so many moving parts.

Let's say for example, one that Australia is very involved with is Square Kilometre Array. That is a massive endeavour that is, you know, a bigger than a billion euro project.

Aside from the data analysis, right, there will be thousands of people involved in the data analysis in the decades to come. The actual sheer process of building an instrument of that scale, it involves hundreds of thousands of antennae in Australia and hundreds of massive dishes in South Africa.

Already you've got a physical scale problem because you need these things to be large and so that by default initiates lots of people and different levels of expertise and building, and different levels of management, oversight, and contributors for funding. And we haven't even started doing astrophysics yet. We're just building an instrument.

So, the more you can lock into these big infrastructure projects, the more you gain access to new technology, new ways thinking, and new ways of bringing together different disciplines to produce something that's never happened before.

Michele Ong

Yeah, it's full multidisc. It's great.

Sabine Bellstedt

It's wonderful. It really, really is.

The societal benefit we receive from large-scale research and development.

Michele Ong

Yeah. And you also mentioned about access to all these technologies and developments because one of the very cool things about these very large projects is because you are working at scales that most industries don't necessarily need, you're having to access all these technologies and all these innovations that haven't even been invented yet in some cases.

And having to, you know, build all these other things that ripple down into the other industries that create all these other cool things. Like, one of the funny things that came up with Katherine Bennell-Pegg talking about how the battery-powered drill was actually a space thing just because they needed not to have cords, and so they developed the battery pack for power tools and now everyone's got them, and they're super accessible, and pretty affordable.

And that's how we get a bunch of cool tech from all of the stuff that's done on these massive big scale projects.

Sabine Bellstedt

It's true. And I mean, I think people working on this cutting edge of projects are used to, or comfortable with rather, is probably a better way of saying it, a high level of failure. Because we know that this is experimental and we know that, well, realistically, you've put a lot of effort into producing something that will probably never be replicated.

Because why would we build an incredible telescope and then just build a second one if we're going to put effort into a second one, you build the next bigger and greater thing, so everything's always on the cutting edge.

I was at a, a meeting last week that was all about combining the SKA with the European Southern Observatory, which is astronomy on a very different level.

And this organisation in Europe is currently building the European Extremely Large Telescope. We all know how astronomers love to, you know, have very creative names for their sources. But this is, this is a mind blowing facility in that it is a telescope with a 40-metre-wide mirror. This is an incredible amount of glass.

But the point made by the person who was presenting the current status on this project, was that one of the innovations to come out of this telescope-building is that when you have such an enormous amount of glass in the many telescopes we have around the world, that glass needs to be incredibly stable in temperature changes.

It's not allowed to expand or shrink–

Michele Ong

Or it'll crack.

Sabine Bellstedt

Or not only will it crack, but it'll have like nanometer fluctuations which we can't afford for the clarity of our images. And so there have been enormous strides made in even just specific ceramic materials that you can use to coat instead of just normal glasses.

And what I didn't know until just last week is that it's this sort of ceramic innovation that's responsible for all the cooking tops and induction cooking top technology. Because that also needs to be very stable under pressure and temperature changes. So it's exactly what you're saying.

It's these big picture problems that we need to come up with creative ways of solving, and then we realise oh wait, there are many other things we can do with that.

Michele Ong

That's so cool. I love that because who would've thought that a telescope could turn into an induction cooktop?

Sabine Bellstedt

I didn't, and I'm an astronomer, so it just goes to show.

Michele Ong

I know. And it's all these really fascinating, cross-discipline, out-of-the-box applications for things that you are not gonna know what's going to exist until you give it a shot. And you never know what innovation you have– someone else will go, oh hey, I've been looking for something like this for a bit.

Sabine Bellstedt

It's incredible. And it's exciting.

Curiosity-driven development is valuable.

Michele Ong

It's so exciting 'cause you don't know what's gonna come next. It's all very exploratory and very curiosity-driven.

Sabine Bellstedt

And I think that's incredibly valuable, not just for the industry applications and the technological benefits that it gets, but I think it's just nurturing for the soul if we just know that we have new things out there to learn about and we can, we have the skillset to wheedle out answers about our universe and the world we live in.

Michele Ong

Yes, and I mean, if you're getting philosophical, it's pretty much, you know why humans exist, right? Like, people are people because they always want to know, and they want to find out, and they want to break things. So, you know, we're good at this.

What we can learn from galactic and extra-galactic surveys.

Michele Ong

So, as part of the work that you do, you're working with WAVES, which is the Wide Area Vista ExtraGalactic Survey, and also GAMA, all these acronyms, they really do love them, don't they?

Sabine Bellstedt

We really do.

Michele Ong

Galaxy And Mass Assembly Survey. So you've briefly touched on this, but what sort of things can we learn from these surveys of galaxies in the kind of scale that you're working with?

Sabine Bellstedt

These are incredibly rich datasets where depending on the kind of astronomer you ask, you will probably get a different answer because the applications for knowledge from these are so huge. I mentioned that I like galaxies themselves. So for me it's about having the broadest statistical sample of galaxies.

So GAMA that you mentioned is a precursor– not a precursor, it's a spectacular survey in its own right, and it's been in existence for over a decade now. And it's produced hundreds of scientific publications, and there's a lot that we've learned about the statistical evolution of galaxies and everything else.

WAVES is a planned survey. It'll be starting in about a year's time where we're very, very excited, but it will expand the sample. So we're looking at a much greater region of the sky and we're looking much deeper.

Depth is a common term that we use in astronomy.

Effectively that just means if you– it's like if you look at the night sky and you let your eyes acclimatise. So when you first go out into the dark sky, you see maybe a couple of stars. You probably only catch the planets 'cause they're quite bright. You obviously catch the moon. Those are the the brightest things. As you let your eye acclimatise, you capture more and more of the fainter sources, and then you go a little bit deeper, is that how we call it.

If you then use a camera, you are able to go even deeper. If you use a bigger telescope, you go even deeper. And the fainter things are either things that are farther away, so out into the distant universe, or they're just things that are smaller, so like small galaxies. Anyway, so that's depth.

And so this particular survey goes out wider in area, so more samples, and greater in depth, so you catch the small stuff. So that gives us the statistics for galaxy evolution itself. Wonderful.

Galaxies as a tracer.

Sabine Bellstedt

But also, if you start mapping in 3D space exactly where you find every galaxy, then you start using galaxies as a tracer. And what we mean by that is galaxies form sort of the bright backbone for what is actually a really big, spongy-like, universe. And it's filled mostly with dark matter. We can't see dark matter, but if we can see enough of the galaxies, we can map out where the dark matter would be.

Michele Ong

Like the negative space.

Sabine Bellstedt

It's exactly like that.

Tracing the paths of celestial bodies.

Sabine Bellstedt

And there's a myriad of other exciting science that you might do that can only be done if you have a map of the universe.

For example, and this is just a couple of really exciting things, if you look at quasars. So quasars are effectively feeding black holes that are phenomenally bright. If you look at quasars in a very distant universe, then the light that reaches us from them has had to move through all of the stuff that we can't see in between. And as it moves it absorbs some of the gas, or the light absorbs some of the gas and it means that the signal that we receive, has got all of these little absorption lines in them. And those are indicators of what's in between.

Now that's a flourishing field of research. That's fascinating, but to correlate that with what's happening in between, it's really hard unless you have mapped out the universe in between and all of a sudden you can say, right, in massive clusters, this happens to the gas. In small groups, this happens to the gas. In the vast emptiness of space, how empty is that actually, or can we correlate that with absorption signatures that we see?

So that's looking at, you know, diffuse gas or medium that we're learning because we've studied the galaxies, but only as a tracer of all the big stuff in between.

There's a long list of things like this, but it's really exciting work.

Michele Ong

Very cool. And that's where the epidemiology part comes in, because you are studying the path that it's taken and what makes up its path based on the trace elements, which is kind of the thing that you get with genetics as well. And when you do skin cell or hair samples and you can see where someone was born, the kinds of environments they've lived in because of what they ate and the air they breathed, and all of that environmental stuff that you draw into your body as trace elements, the way that celestial bodies and other things like that will collect stuff along the way on their journey.

It's all very cool.

Sabine Bellstedt

That's a beautiful analogy actually.

Michele Ong

Oh, thank you. But yeah, that's awesome. I, I love that because you get to hear– you get to learn their story and their path through whatever it is they've been doing through space and time, because all of that is also over large scales of time as well.

Sabine Bellstedt

It sure is.

Learning about how we learn about the universe.

Michele Ong

So that's your specialty in looking at the galaxies and where they come from asyour particular area of research. So what have you discovered so far in particular that has kind of like, you've already given an example of super shiny things, but what has been something that's super shiny to you?

Sabine Bellstedt

I like to really, really delve into the details of how we do the processes that we do. Which means that, the consequence of that is that I learn a lot, but not about the universe, but about how we see the universe. Which is not so much in discovery space, so it never sounds quite as exciting when I put it that way.

So for example, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing is we measure the brightness of galaxies, and then we do that in lots and lots of different wavelengths. And it's usually brighter in the optical than it is in the ultraviolet, and also by the time you move to the infrared, it gets a bit dimmer, and then, in the, the far infrared booms in brightness. And that's 'cause galaxies have a lot of dust. So there's, there's all of this beautiful detail in every individual galaxy.

But to go from that to, well this particular galaxy formed all of its stars between two and 10 billion years ago exactly, and then it suddenly shut off, and that's how we learn things about the central black hole inside them. To make that sort of link, you need to model this brightness of galaxies. And that modelling process is something that we've made incredible strides in learning about over the last couple of decades.

So much so that I think we get pretty confident that we know exactly how we're doing this, and I spent a lot of time digging into those assumptions and techniques and realising that, oh my goodness, there are still so many things that we actually don't know as well as we do, and we need to nut down into some of these technicalities.

We've had a really good reminder in the last couple of years as to why this is so important, because we've had this, you know, spectacular new telescope, called the James Webb Space Telescope, that suddenly pushed our knowledge of galaxies to the farthest frontier.

We are measuring galaxies at higher reaches than we ever thought we would, and we're applying all of our fantastic modelling techniques to these new galaxies, and we're suddenly getting results that are inconsistent with our understanding of the universe. And we've had news articles all around the world saying dark matter is wrong, or we don't understand the universe, and it can't be 14 billion years old.

And you know, really big sweeping statements and a lot of them we can solve just by saying well this very basic modelling of a galaxy that we do to get from light to mass has some complexities and that, that's the space that I work in is saying, okay, well how do we fix these things so that when we have exciting new discoveries, we have the toolbox ready to make accurate assumptions from it.

Michele Ong

Yeah, well, it's back to what you were saying at the beginning with the models that work for the first few layers, and then they just spectacularly fail because suddenly there are enough factors involved that haven't been accounted for yet, that push it out. And yeah, when you're working with that volume of data, like the odds of you not failing at some point– you're just going to have to fail at some point.

Sabine Bellstedt

Oh, completely.

The sticky problem of finding just the right amount of complexity.

Michele Ong

Yeah, there's just too much stuff and even some of the things that you were working on before, I was looking through your papers, and I saw that you'd actually done effectively noise cancellation on the James Webb– oh, what– you called it, it was Wisp Removal.

Sabine Bellstedt

That's the one. Yep.

Michele Ong

I was looking at that going, you've just edged detected galaxies. How?

Because that's just, yeah. It's just all of these are specks. Which specks are important? I don't know. And it is talking about how we do the modelling because there're so many ways to skin a cat, and with maths you can use multiple ways of coming up with the same answer under very specific conditions. But as soon as you change one of the conditions, one of those formulas will fail.

So you don't know which one of those formulas is the one that's gonna be the most resilient over time.

Sabine Bellstedt

Completely. And the difficulty is, is that, we call this over-fitting, in that if you, if you just add more complexity to your model, chances are you can fit your data much better. You can, you can create the answer in a really complex way that looks perfect.

But then if you add more data, suddenly your complex model is doing the wrong thing. It's projected it in all the wrong directions. And so it's always that battle between having enough data to support a complex model, but having that model be as simple as possible to not get things wrong. So it's a gloriously sticky situation, actually.

Michele Ong

It sounds fun and terrible.

The also sticky problem of the carbon footprint of astronomy.

Michele Ong

So as part of that kind of work that you're doing,I saw that, because it is large volumes of data, you mentioned on your LinkedIn profile that one of the other things that you're interested in is the carbon footprint of astronomy, and I think that is also an equally sticky problem.

So for those who I guess are fairly new to this area, when you need a lot of data, well, when you have a lot of data, you need a lot of processing, when you need a lot of processing, you need a lot of compute, a lot of compute costs a lot of energy, and to create the compute, you also need the cool the machines doing the compute to do all that, which is very expensive in terms of power, and other sorts of resources, which increases our carbon footprint.

So when you think about the immense volumes of data that you're getting at any point in time from any of the data sources in the area of astronomy, that's a tonne of carbon footprint. So what have you learned in your analysis of this and the ways in which we can work on reducing the carbon footprint of astronomy?

Sabine Bellstedt

It's a sticky one and it's a difficult one because the solution to the carbon footprint problem– The easy solution, rather, is exactly the opposite to what we want as astrophysicists, is to delete our data and to do less compute. And that's actually not an option. We doing that because that defeats the purpose of all this exciting stuff that we're doing.

So it's about finding the right compromises. As much as possible, it's identifying as we mentioned earlier, what is the most critical element of the data and restricting the dataset to just that. It means we have to be a lot more comfortable with deleting data, and I probably get goosebumps just saying it.

Michele Ong

Stress.

Sabine Bellstedt

Yeah, completely. And I hate it. I had a situation recently where I was working on an analysis product where I started with a 20 gigabyte data file. It was only a couple of thousand galaxies. It was kind of a test bed of the modelling. And by the time I got through all of this modelling and testing and trying it with different configurations, I had on my hard drive, 40 terabytes of model outputs.

That, that going from this small amount, this huge amount of output that I was then having so much fun with, you know, analysis. It's nice for a test bed, but that is an entirely unfeasible mechanism for working on larger scales. And I know I had a conversation with my colleague where he was saying, oh, well just find that, that one data product that you need for each and just delete everything else. Don't even save it. Just, just run the outputs and delete. And I thought, but I can't. I can't.

Michele Ong

What if I need it?

Sabine Bellstedt

Exactly. And that's something that I need to learn how to do, just like all of my colleagues do. And the reality is that the processing power is big and that comes with its carbon footprint.

But what we also forget is that simply data storage has own carbon footprint, and it's quite a massive one. So in some sense, we're actually better off recomputing things on the fly constantly than we are saving the outputs into one output to quickly query down the line.

We live in a world of cloud computing and cloud storage, and we forget that just because the hard drive is not sitting on my desk, doesn't mean it's not producing a huge output of carbon somewhere else in the world.

Michele Ong

Exactly, andwe're able to do things so much more efficiently now than we used to because, you know, before it would be years to process. Like, even when I was speaking to a geneticist, they were talking about how one of the projects they were working on took seven years to do by hand and with the state of the computers at the time, that can now take maybe a day. Because we've got the hardware and the power to do it.

So yeah, it's absolutely the trade-off of well, before we used to have to keep everything because it took forever to generate it to begin with. But now, because we do have the capacity and the technology to be able to do it, we can be a little bit more free with deleting things that we may not need immediately.

Because overall that's gonna be cheaper to delete and not store than it is to pay for the extra compute.

Sabine Bellstedt

Absolutely, and I mean the other element of this argument or this debate is that we need to be better at writing software, and the actual software that we write has to be as efficient as it can be. And I think this is another really strong argument for why it takes more than just a small group of people to do it — science these days — because the real benefits that people have seen in the realm of astrophysics is to actually work really closely with people whose expertise is not astrophysics, but it's software development and computer science.

And when you have these marriages of different disciplines to say, well, I know what the software needs to do, and yet astronomers write a lot of code, we do a lot of software development, so it's not something we're awful at. But at the same time, we're not trained to do it efficiently, and to do it well, and to do it quickly. And so when you have this marriage with someone who has expertise in a different realm, you suddenly get to unlocking massive functionality with much faster speed and much lower carbon footprint.

So this is wonderful.

Michele Ong

Yeah, absolutely. And it's efficiency from the astrophysics side, efficiency from the computing side, and you know, you're able to also get the benefit of these outside perspectives from people looking at data in a way that's not become their narrow focus for decades. And it allows them to see, well actually this is purely a computing or a mathematics problem, I'm not gonna look at it as a physics problem.

And it just gives you an entirely different view of the way that you can approach a problem, which is very cool as well.

Sabine Bellstedt

Completely. Yep.

Michele Ong

Oh, so shiny, like this is why I love talking to astrophysicists because they do get to work with such a wide variety of people on such a broad range of problems that you don't necessarily see the perspective or the application immediately.

But you get this way of being able to get other people's perspectives to contribute to this wider problem that just comes up with this beautiful solution at the end because they didn't see it coming at the beginning because that's not what they were looking for at the start. It's all very special and serendipitous.

Serendipitous is one of the beautiful words. Yep.

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How women and diversity contributes to the sciences.

Michele Ong

We're gonna take a bit of a segue right now because on a rather topical note, there was in the news that the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which is you know, a global testing thing for science and maths, showed that Australia overall improved in their rankings in this area for students between, I think year four to eight, but the gender gap was the worst amongst 58 countries, which I think is very, very sad.

Lots of reasons why that might be, but I think it's super sad because we need a lot more people, male and female, in all sorts of intersections, in these spaces for the reasons we were just talking about in terms of perspectives and getting skillsets in other areas to be able to contribute to problems.

Sabine Bellstedt

Absolutely.

Michele Ong

So why, 'cause you've mentioned it before, is it's so important to have women in the field of astronomy, and what–or how does it benefit the industry?

Sabine Bellstedt

I think a lot of this ends up coming down to the way we do science and not the aims of science itself. I think we all agree that historically, there have been incredible women throughout history who have made enormous contributions to science. So it's not that it's been a lone field for men, but it's been dominated by men and the narrative has largely been set by men.

And it means that the way we do science has been largely governed by that up until now. The kinds of roles scientists have in terms of what is it that a scientist does at work every day? And I genuinely think that women, a lot of the time, have perspectives in the workplace that mean the way that we do science is slightly different.

Not to say that we, you know, only have soft skills and men have technical skills, but in the realm of skills that we have, I think my experience of female colleagues is that they pay attention to the gaps a little bit more perhaps than the sticky problems that are being solved. We tend to work with people really effectively and in the realm of really large collaborations and international teams, that is a critical set. And to combine those sorts of outlooks with the technical work that we do is really, really important.

I've been in a really big European project at the moment, and it has up to a thousand people that are preparing busily for a new instrument to be installed in a telescope. And it's still an industry that suffers from having too few women. And I'm regularly in telecons that have 20, 30 people and I'm often one of maybe one or two women in the crowd. And it's– well actually, it's not surprising to me at all, that a lot of the time the people that are quite vocal or the people that end up finding themselves in leadership roles are those women in the crowd.

And I think that really speaks to the care that is taken and the diverse perspectives that help the crowd that those women can provide. And it breaks my heart a little bit that it hasn't been an industry that has been as welcoming to a broader crowd.

The nuances of "You can't be what you can't see".

Sabine Bellstedt

"You can't be what you can't see", that's not the case for everyone. You get women who don't need to see role models and they can absolutely see themselves in a role, but that's not the case for most. And when you have research groups where there are women in higher positions and you see younger students, both male and female, I don't think this is only for young female students, model their behaviour and their expectations differently because of it, I think that's a wonderful thing.

Michele Ong

Absolutely. And yeah, as you said, you don't necessarily need to have the– "you can't be what you can't see" I've always felt was very limiting because, it's not something that I had really thought about up until it became such a hot button topic. But as a woman of colour which I still find very odd to say, even though it's a technical definition now, I never thought about it that way.

I just went, I want to do the thing. I see people doing the thing. That's a thing that I can do. It never occurred to me that gender would play a part or race would play a part in it. But I know there are a lot of people who do very much care about the ratio because they need to see the role models. But at the same time, I don't think you need to see them in your direct line of seniority.

You can still find role models outside and in other areas who you can aspire to, who you can seek advice from, and they do not have to be in your specific industry or career to be able to provide you that kind of role model support.

Sabine Bellstedt

Absolutely.

Michele Ong

Yeah. So, looking at the field of astronomy and in space as the broader industry, I think it's important for young women who are looking into this area to not worry so much about the ratio, but worry about the values and the culture that they'll be working in. Because if you're with a bunch of people who just care about the goal and you care about the people who they can work with to achieve that goal, the ratio wasn't so important.

Balancing criteria with the intangibles that only you can bring to a role.

Sabine Bellstedt

Yep. I think the one element of this debate where "you can't be what you can't see" becomes really, really important is, and I think–I actually don't know if there's anything research done on this, but it's a well quoted anecdote that if you have a job application, for example, if there are 10 criteria, women will tend to expect of themselves they can satisfy all 10 criteria before they will put themselves forward for a role. Whereas men are comfortable with fewer.

And seen this anecdotally around me. And I think what I've noticed when speaking with a lot of junior women as well, is the same that I, I know my value, I know what I can offer, but the skills that I know I can offer haven't been explicitly stated in how I see you doing this or how I've seen you promoting this task, whatever it is, and therefore, I'm not the right person for you. And so I see women taking themselves out of the running, not because they're incompetent, but because they think my skillset is better applied elsewhere.

And this comment that you make about seeing role models outside of your line of supervision, I think is, is exactly right because I can see women in, oh, and men for that matter, but I think women happen to have some of the skills that I have a little bit more keenly. Who've been in various fields, and I've seen them really succeed and do amazing work, where I think if we had one of those in my field of research, they would achieve things that I don't currently see. And that in itself makes them an exquisite role model, even if it's not in my direct line.

So it's about seeing your skillset and applying it to what you think could be useful as opposed to what you see being directly requested as well.

Michele Ong

Absolutely. It's such an important thing because more and more now we're seeing people talking about how selection criteria– it's very prescriptive, but it doesn't consider the intangibles and people are starting to work that into their applications and work that into the criteria now to talk about how we can identify the intangibles that do contribute that kind of value that aren't specifically related to industry skills.

And yeah, it's a slow change, but it's just making people more aware that these are the kinds of things that we are looking for. Not necessarily soft skills, but the ability to be able to, I guess, overcome or think outside the box, you know, all those sorts of expressions that we use to talk about being able to achieve a goal, but not necessarily in the way that everyone else has done.

Sabine Bellstedt

Exactly right. We've got a very, very strong group here at my workplace that works phenomenally well together, and it's one of the reasons I would love to stay here for the rest of my career. But the benefit of that is that every new person who's joined the team hasn't had the same skillset.

And you build these diverse teams, and sometimes the most difficult thing is to look for something that you don't have.It's 'cause you know what, what is needed? You know how all these people have been successful. You know how they've managed to make contributions. And so typically that governs how we then hire for the next role.

But that's exactly the wrong thing for us to be doing. We should be finding a way to look at everyone's skills for their own merit and see how do they work with what we have. And like you say, we're working on, you know, globally in different industries, how we find that, but hopefully we get better.

Michele Ong

Exactly. And I mean all those additional things that aren't fully in criteria that make each person's contribution unique, rubs off on everyone else and everyone grows and that's how you get even more evolved teams. So yeah, benefits all 'round.

Sabine Bellstedt

Absolutely.

What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do, and what advice should they ignore?

Michele Ong

So we'll start to wind up now, which I think is a really good way to lead into my last question, which is, what advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do and what advice should they ignore?

Sabine Bellstedt

Well it's hard because I think any advice that I give will be entirely dependent on someone's situation in life and what it is they do and don't do already.

Enjoy what you do. But the advice to do something you're passionate about, I actually don't love, because I would say I'm passionate about my work, but I'm passionate about so many things.

So my advice would just be pursue passions, full stop. But don't expect your work to be fully satisfying or passionate all the time, because that's a lie. I love my work, but I don't love everything about my work.

Michele Ong

You are a multifaceted being.

Sabine Bellstedt

Exactly. Exactly. So be okay with not loving things all the time. If you hate your work or your path all the time, okay, listen to that.

But like we said earlier, you know, follow the base curiosity and see where that leads you otherwise.

That was a long-winded way of saying, yes, do what you love, but don't expect to be your full passion. So that's simultaneously advice and advice to ignore.

But I think always be open to opportunities around you. Be inquisitive, talk to people.

We live in an internet age. I think for any young people now who are inquiring about careers, they inevitably have a lot more information at their fingertips than even I did when I was going through that phase. That I can only imagine is very difficult because it means you're swamped by information and swamped by advice, and that's a wonderful thing, but it's also an overwhelming thing and it doesn't help decision-making a lot of the time.

Michele Ong

You have to learn to be discerning and understanding that you can drop suggestions that just don't apply to you, and that's okay.

Sabine Bellstedt

Yes. Absolutely right. And you can have multiple options that will be fascinating. And that doesn't mean you have to pursue them all either.

Just pick one sometimes that this is, this is my 2025 Lesson to Self, is don't say yes to everything and don't pursue everything that you'd like to do because it degrades the quality of the things you do end up doing.

Find nuggets, follow them, and as much as possible, think of yourself and be happy while you're doing it.

Michele Ong

Oh, that's good advice. And applies to all areas of life.

Easier said than done, but it's a thing to achieve. It's a general philosophy.

Sabine Bellstedt

Absolutely

Michele Ong

Very cool.

Find out more about Sabine and astronomy.

Michele Ong

Well, thank you so much Sabine, for speaking with me today about your journey and your work. I have really enjoyed nerding out with you about astrophysics and all the cool stuff that you're doing on the scale that you are doing it.

So if people would like to know more about this area, where can they look?

Sabine Bellstedt

Well I do have a website online, so if anyone's curious, there are a whole bunch of contact details there. Do feel free to reach out, and at least where we're based in Perth and Western Australia, we've got a flourishing hub of astronomers that are building across a broad range of spaces based at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

Look us up online and you'll be privy to the broad range of activities that we do here.

Michele Ong

Absolutely. I-C-R-A-R, ICRAR, is very, very cool, lots of activities and events that you guys do run. So if people would like to know more about that, they can go check those out. And I'll also put links to GAMA, WAVES, and DEVILS, another project that you're involved with up on the website as well in the show notes.

Sabine Bellstedt

Please do. It was wonderful chatting with you this morning, Michele.

Michele Ong

Yes, absolutely wonderful speaking with you today, and I hope you have an amazing rest your day.

Sabine Bellstedt

Likewise to you.

Michele Ong

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