A n d r e a P r e s t w i c h
Astrophysicist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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P2K:
What made you interested in astronomy?
Andrew Prestwich:
I have always wanted to be an astronomer, for as long as I can remember, from the age when I was about 5. It's hard to really pinpoint certain things that pushed me in that direction, but I do remember when I was very little sitting with my Dad on a Saturday morning and he had a big old atlas and I loved looking at the maps. But the map that I really loved the best was a map of the solar system. And he used to point out the different planets and he used to explain how they were different, you know, there were rocky planets and there were gas giants. And I found this fascinating, that there could be other worlds. And it just seemed so strange and mysterious. And then when I was young, in '69, I must have only been 6 or 7, the first Moon landings happened and I found that incredibly inspiring, to think that human beings could go to other worlds. So ever since then I've wanted to be an astronomer.
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P2K:
Was there anything at school which inspired you?
Andrew Prestwich:
I had one incredibly good physics teacher who was an inspiration then and who I am still in contact with now, and he was incredibly encouraging. He used to talk to me about physics during his lunch hours, and his enthusiasm was so catching. When I was in high school, actually being a girl or a woman who wanted to do science was hard, actually. Because it was not considered a very feminine thing to do back then -- probably isn't still now.
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P2K:
What got you interested in black holes?
Andrew Prestwich:
I came into this research because I am interested in star formation. That's been the theme throughout my research career-star formation. I did my thesis on star bursts and star formation and so I actually started looking at X-ray galaxies in the X-rays because I wanted to know what these bright points are, and how they got there. And it turns out that probably a lot of them are black holes! So actually I have come to black hole research in a very round about kind of way, because really I am a star formation person, but you know it is absolutely intriguing to find that so many of these points are probably black holes.
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P2K:
And what made you interested in star formation?
Andrew Prestwich:
That's an almost metaphysical question... I love thinking about star formation and star formation galaxies because it is just so beautiful!
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