Peter Swanton

Pursuing Astronomy and Astrophysics 

Peter Swanton’s inspiration to pursue a space career came after he tried physics for the first time at university. After avoiding the field throughout high school due to a lack of encouragement from those around him, it was a dedicated lecturer that changed Peter’s career trajectory. 

“He was very passionate about physics, but also about education and his students. I wanted to be like him, so I decided to follow him into his field of Astronomy and Astrophysics.” 

As a Gamilaraay-Yuwaalyaay man (central north of New South Wales), Peter had always been passionate about his culture. 

“While my inspiration for pursuing Astronomy and Astrophysics came from my first-year physics lecturer, my inspiration for moving into Indigenous Astronomy/Sky Knowledges came from myself. I wanted to find a way to combine both my academic background in Astronomy and Astrophysics with my heritage.” 

Scaling new research heights

Peter studied a Bachelor of Science (Physics) at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. When he graduated in 2019, he became the first person in his family to complete a tertiary education. The research he conducted as part of this degree took him to new heights, with the opportunity to present his research project at a NASA conference in Los Angeles. 

This research looked at classifying the variability of the light emitted from the accretion disk around an Active Galactic Nuclei called 3C273. Whilst Peter’s work in astronomy initially began with research around black holes and cosmology, he has transitioned to focus to cultural astronomy and dark sky preservation.

Studying a Master of Philosophy, and then later a PhD, Peter’s work highlights the scientific importance of Indigenous star knowledges, and what needs to be done to preserve these knowledges on Country, as well as in the night sky. 

When speaking about some of the inspirations he has had throughout his career, Peter talks about his research supervisor, Dr Brad Tucker. “We get to work closely together on many school outreach activities where we get to take our perspectives on Astronomy, from the Indigenous perspectives which date back thousands of years, to the very cutting edge current and future technologies, ideas and challenges in astronomy and space. Our project is largely centred around visiting rural and remote areas of Australia, taking this experience to students who may not have easy access to observatories or universities that students in large cities do.”

Australia’s dark skies

Peter believes that it is Australia’s uniquely dark skies that allow us to be a world leader in championing ethical and sustainable development of space technology:

“I believe that Australia is uniquely placed to be a leader in ensuring that our current and future endeavours in space are done so in an ethical and sustainable manner. 

We are already seeing the impacts that introducing mass amounts of satellites is having on Astronomy, particularly satellite mega-constellations. These satellites are also contributing to an increase in artificial light at night, or light pollution, which will have impacts on places around Australia and the World, that will have previously been unaffected by ground based light pollution causes. 

Ensuring that we have access to the night sky, be it for astronomy, which has been observed culturally for thousands of years, or at our world class facilities such as Siding Spring Observatory for optical astronomy, or the Square Kilometre Array and Parkes Radio telescopes for radio astronomy, Australia has a heritage of connection to the dark and quiet skies that we should be striving to preserve.”