Hiranya Peiris

which we can map. So if you have billions of galaxies, you can back out the intrinsic shapes of the galaxies and extract the very, very faint dark matter signal and use that to map out how structure is evolving over the course of the universe's history. So that's what we plan to do. What is your role then on the project?

So I'm one of the people who is going to turn those pictures into conclusions about dark matter and dark energy. So it's another statistical bridge, but because the volume and complexity of the data is so great, the statistics now has to be augmented by machine learning and very advanced AI techniques.

Yes, that's right. One of the missions is to find all the near-Earth asteroids and map their orbits so that we might be able to have an early warning of any potential collision. When they were taking those first light pictures, Jim, that you said you found on the web, just 10 hours of observations just to get some beauty shots, they found 2,000 asteroids that had never been mapped before. None heading towards Earth.

None so far heading towards Earth. You can see them jiggling around on the sky. And to me this was just amazing, because you feel that the solar system is just alive. This still gives me goosebumps. Of course, Hollywood's already made lots of movies about asteroids hitting the Earth. But as the legacy survey of space and time makes its movie of the universe, I for one am hoping it's going to be a box office hit for science.

Thank you so much, Jim.

It's really nice to be here.

It comes from being a young girl myself and falling in love with science through, for example, books, where the people who were writing the books were very inspirational, but they did not look like me.

And I want young girls to see role models that look like themselves

doing the things that they can aspire to.

And that's what drives my passion for having those young girls in the front row, not in the back row, and sometimes not even in the room.

When I'm doing science, I feel that we are on a search for truth as humanity.

And I really connect to that idea.

For me, it is a safe place.

It is a place where things make sense.

When you state a fact, it is an objective truth about reality rather than something someone made up.

This marks a time when astrophysics, as distinct from astronomy, became a subject of study.

That's right.

Yeah, so astronomy can be thought of as mapping the universe.

But astrophysics is turning the data or the observations we have made into understanding and connecting it to fundamental physics.

And that started around the time of 1909.