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Dr. Claire Bretherton was at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in the UK before recently migrating to work at the newly-redeveloped Carter Observatory in Wellington. Seeing as she holds a doctorate in astronomy, specialising in galaxies, Critic thought Dr. Bretherton would be the perfect person to shed some light on black holes, dark matter, and Stephen Hawking's recent comments.

 
 
Where did your interest in astronomy originate?
As a child I was always interested in looking up at the stars and seeing what was around us. I was always lucky that when I was at school, I was good at things like maths and science, and so it sort of arose from there really.
 
Dark matter, that most elusive of substances, is said to make up most of the mass within galaxies. What is your take on the subject?
One of the ways in which dark matter was actually discovered was by looking at galaxies. When you look at a galaxy, you can look at the amount of light from it and from that you can work out how much you think it should weigh and how much mass it should have. But you can also look at how fast it spins right from the centre out to the outside by studying the rotation curve, and from that you can also work out the mass of a galaxy. What astronomers found was that these different masses didn't match up, so there was a lot more mass in the galaxy than you could see in the light it was giving out: so, dark matter.
 
Stephen Hawking recently revealed that he strongly believes in aliens, but warned that, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America ...” What do you think of both the likelihood of this and his statement in general?
Well, the universe is absolutely huge. We think that our galaxy contains 100 billion stars, and that our galaxy is at least one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe, so ... it seems very unlikely to me that one of those planets somewhere else in the universe doesn't have life on it. So, I agree with Stephen Hawking that somewhere in the Universe, life does exist – however, I am not convinced that it would ever be able to find its way to Earth because the distances are just so huge.
 
The Large Hadron Collider has generated massive amounts of interest over the past few years. Are you following its developments closely? Which areas are you interested in?
I was based in the UK until about a couple of months ago, so I was following its developments quite a lot from there. Just in general, some of the research it could do to identify some of these fundamental particles and increase our understanding of the Universe, and of where we come from, and how the Universe began. I think it is our best chance, at the moment, of unfolding some of these problems and questions we do not yet have answers to.
 
These days, New Zealand students are leaving high school with a very basic knowledge of the world beyond the Earth's outer atmosphere. Do you think there is a need to include more Space education in the curriculum?
I think astronomy is a really great science because people do find it interesting. But it also brings in every other branch of science: it brings in physics, it brings in chemistry, it brings in aspects of biology as well when looking at the possibility of where life could exist elsewhere in the Universe, so it is a way of bringing many different types of science together in an interesting way and in an inspiring way.