Niall Deacon - Four Way Interview

Niall Deacon is an astronomy researcher and writer, and lives in Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on failed stars called brown dwarfs and giant planets orbiting other stars. His first book Twenty Worlds tells the story of planets around other stars.

Why science?

I’ve always been someone who loves finding things out. When I was a kid I used to love reading non-fiction books, atlases, books about flags or football stadia etc. I’ve just transferred that to working in science because science is a collection of ways of working things out. There’s just something really exciting about rolling up your sleeves and trying to interpret a dataset, trying to find out what it says about the Universe.

Why this book?

There were a few themes that came together writing this book. The first was that I wanted to write something that covered as wide a range of exoplanet science as possible. I’ve spent years sitting in seminars and conferences listening to talks about lots of amazing science. I wanted to try to tell the story of as much of that science as I could rather than focusing on one particular aspect of exoplanet science. The second was that I wanted to lay out how scientists have found out so much about exoplanets in such a short time. I wanted to talk the reader through as many of the physical processes and observing techniques as possible, using examples a typical interested reader could relate to. 

What's next?

For me, I’m currently working at the IAU’s Office of Astronomy for Education and we are working to build a global network to support astronomy education. I don’t know if I will write another book. It was amazing to write one book, I’ll have to see if I get another opportunity. 

For exoplanets I think we are in a very interesting period of time. We are a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the first planet found around another star similar to the Sun. Since then we’ve found thousands more exoplanets. In the next decade we’re going to get huge facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope, extremely large ground-based telescopes and even space missions dedicated to studying exoplanet atmospheres. This avalanche of data is going to help us learn a lot more about the characteristics of exoplanets, their atmospheres, their compositions etc.

What's exciting you at the moment?

Well I’m sitting here typing two days after the announcement of possible biosignatures in Venus’s upper atmosphere, so that’s exciting. Even if there is no life there, there must be a very interesting chemical process waiting to be revealed. Other than that, I support a football team whose unofficial motto is 'Expect the Unexpected'. That’s how I view astronomy in the future, I’m looking forward to being excited by amazing discoveries that I (and most other scientists) had never even considered.