Danail Obreschkow

Great science from pointless questions

TEDxPerth 2019
September 2019

Talk length:

9:58

Great science from pointless questions | Danail Obreschkow | TEDxPerth

Why conduct scientific research on questions that lack an obvious purpose? Danail Obreschkow argues that science has a long and proud history of discovery from fundamental research, powered by curiosity more than prospects. "We don’t always know the destination, but some roads look very exciting ... and sometimes such roads lead to astounding places!"

In this talk, Danail explains his research on the collapse of bubbles in microgravity and shares the feeling of flying on parabolic flights with the European Space Agency. It’s an endeavour that might seem inapplicable at first, but it has expanded our knowledge on highly concentrated energy - and the applications could include large environmental and medical benefits. Danail is an astrophysicist aiming to understand the origin and evolution of galaxies and the cosmos. He is based at the University of Western Australia (UWA) node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and helps develop the Square Kilometre Array Telescope (SKA) project.

Danail Obreschkow
Senior Research Fellow

Danail’s core areas of research include galaxy evolution, star formation, as well as cosmic large-scale structure. Over the last decade, Danail developed new models for the evolution of cold gas in galaxies, highly relevant to modern observations and future surveys on the Square Kilometre Array telescope. More recently, Danail and his collaborators made fundamental discoveries on the connection between galactic angular momentum and the internal physics of galaxies; and his team also demonstrated the use of new statistical tools to extract information about the cosmos from the large-scale distribution of galaxies in space.