Have you ever wondered how your radio knows what sound to make? Or how your TV knows what picture to show? Or how your phone can load a webpage without being plugged into anything?
The answer is radio waves.
Radio waves are a special kind of light that humans can’t see. But radios, TVs and phones have antennas that can detect them. Humans use radio waves constantly to send information from one place to another across Earth.
Then one day, someone decided to point an antenna at the sky instead.
Do you know what they found?
Radio signals. Everywhere.
Which can only mean one thing…
ALIENS!
…probably not.
It turns out galaxies — enormous collections of stars, gas and dust billions of kilometres away — also produce radio waves. Some even launch gigantic jets of hot material across distances larger than entire galaxies.
Astronomers study these jets because they are so powerful they blast through surrounding space, heat up giant clouds of gas, and influence how many new stars form, revealing some of the universe’s most extreme physics.
In my research, I build mathematical models to understand how these jets behave and how they produce the radio waves we detect here on Earth.
