Emma Chapman

How do you explore distant stars, buried water on Mars or the first moments after the Big Bang – without leaving your back garden? Emma will take us on an electrifying voyage through the cosmos using one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, tools in science: the radio wave. Revealing how these invisible messengers glide through space, bounce off planets, tunnel through clouds and slip past galactic dust, they carry secrets of the universe that no other kind of light can uncover. We can follow a single radio wave as it escapes Earth and travels outward, ricocheting off the Moon, tunnelling through Venus’s furnace-thick atmosphere, tracing ancient ice hidden in Mercury’s shadows and diving deep into the swirling arms of the Milky Way. Emma is an award-winning radio astronomer based at the University of Nottingham, and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin research fellow.