“I want to create the best sky model possible.” Dr Lynch is using the Murchison Widefield Array to look at light from the early Universe.
“My job involves a lot of writing computer code to make measurements using images from a telescope. I measure how bright things are in the images from the telescope and that can tell us different things about that object.”
In addition to writing computer code and analysing telescope data, Dr Lynch also writes papers and attends conferences to share this new information.
“Only about half my job is math, the other half is writing.”
One of the biggest problems with Dr Lynch’s area of research is that there is a lot of things in the way between the first light in the Universe and us here on Earth. “We don’t know what the [Epoch of Reionisation] signal is supposed to look like, and we have to build really good models of the sky.”
Dr Lynch says that she enjoys the team environment with her research group at Curtin Uni, and that everyone has their own roles to play.
“The idea is that all of the parts will come together and we’ll actually be able to make a detection of the EoR.”