He looks deep into space as a professional, but the night sky is an object of fascination to Zdeněk Mikulášek, just as it is to the rest of us. The name of this astronomer is inseparable from Czech astrophysics. He developed the subject at the MU Faculty of Science and for many years was director of Brno's astronomical observatory.
Why are people fascinated by the stars?
We all like to look up to something that is beyond our control, both metaphorically and literally. When we are children, this something may be our parents, who we look up to as givers of security. As adults, too, we turn our gaze upwards, to the sky, when we want to feel happy and safe. The famous astronomer Hambardzumyan said that one of the things that make humans different from pigs is how occasionally they raise their heads to look up at the stars. When we gaze at the stars, we are distracted from our cares and stop being merely terrestrial beings.
Is that why astronomy is so popular?
I suppose so, yes. Above all, astronomy is one of the oldest of the natural sciences. Since time immemorial people have looked at the sky and noticed that there is something going on up there. It shows us that there is some kind of order – something calculable, something that can be predicted. It's not like this in normal life, where we are victims of all kinds of accidents, where things jump out at us here, creep up on us there. But the sky runs like clockwork. The sun rises and sets – there's never any exception. The moon has its phases as it moves among the stars. Astronomy gives people a chance to use their wits to understand and manage nature.
Even as a boy you worked at the Brno observatory. What drew you to the place?
Quite simply, I liked looking at the sky, and when I was about twelve I started taking a more serious interest in it. I often went to the observatory, and then I became a demonstrator there. This role still exists, and is mostly filled by youngsters. They show visitors stars, planets and nebulae and tell them what they know about them. My time as a demonstrator was a special one; it gave me a lot, and I hope the visitors got something out of it, too. It provided me with experience of performing for an audience, and I lost my shyness about talking science.
Your story is like a dream come true. You went from being a demonstrator at the observatory to its director.
It wasn't as straightforward as that. In the meantime I studied – but not astronomy and astrophysics, that wasn't yet possible in Brno, but physics. Then I became a university teacher of physics, a job I was dismissed from in the years of Normalization, when I was barred from the teaching profession. At the time I was thankful that I was able to return to the observatory. Although it was a last resort, I made a career out of it for rather a long time. And as you mentioned, after the Velvet Revolution it fell to me to take up the directorship, and I ended up doing that for about twelve years.
Then you went back to university.
I'd always been more strongly attracted to science and teaching at university. Having served a number of years as director, I told myself that perhaps the time was right for a change. And my dream was realized. I returned to Masaryk University, brought in a number of capable people and built a department of astrophysics.
So it wasn't until sometime in 2001 that you got to do what you'd wanted all your life.
Some would say I was rather old for it, but I say better late than never.
What is the work of today's astronomer like? I don't imagine you spending your nights looking through a telescope.
Sometimes I do, you know. Researchers like me, who are reliant on observation and are not out-and-out theoreticians, have to get results from observation of the sky somehow. There are many ways of doing this. I can ask someone to observe something for me, or I can take published results and compare them with something from the archives. But sometimes I perform the observation myself. I spend a lot of time putting together extensive time series gleaned from observation of a particular object. Often material is highly heterogeneous, as it was created by different observers using different technologies at different times. Still, it sometimes happens that you dig out really remarkable information. You can never make up for things from the past that were not observed, but for this reason these things are absolutely unique, not least as the data they provide is not as precise as today's. And they allow you to compare the state of astronomical objects in, let's say, 1935 with their state today. We can work out a lot from connections between past and present.
I've always been fascinated by how we can tell so much about astronomical objects although we look at them from such great distances.
The observer must have an active imagination and the ability to picture what the stars really look like. The vast majority of them appear to us only as dimensionless points in the sky. The only thing that connects us to them is their light, which furthermore takes dozens, hundreds, in some cases even millions of years to reach us. But we can tell a lot from it; we just need to know how. The key is to get a star's light spectrum, which is like its thumbprint. Every star has its own light spectrum, which makes it unique. We can read a great deal from this, such as the chemical composition and temperature of its surface, and how quickly it revolves.
You deal a lot with so-called chemically peculiar stars. What are they?
Stars that have a very strong magnetic field and whose surface is not of homogeneous chemical composition. This affects the spectral composition of the light emitted, which is manifested in the fact of our seeing coloured spots. I sometimes call these stars painted ladies. Otherwise they are quite normal, but by prettifying their surface, they attract our attention.
Does our examination of these objects help us to understand the nature of the universe? Big topics of recent years include dark matter and dark energy.
The process of exploring the universe gradates very quickly. In recent years the volume of information has increased practically exponentially. We might as well throw away textbooks on the structure of space that were published fifteen years ago. Today we know that we live in a universe in which matter composed of atoms and molecules represents only a small part. We know that we are dealing here with some kind of dark matter, which – although we can't see it – is playing around with the visible part of the universe. And there is also dark energy as a predominant factor in the evolution of the universe. Dark energy is characterized by the fact that it causes gravitational repulsion, and thanks to this the universe is expanding ever more quickly.
What are your research ambitions?
I know that if I do my job conscientiously and with an open mind, the discoveries will come of their own accord. It's like mushrooming. Twenty people search a single place in a wood but fail to find the beautiful boletus concealed by a tree stump; it is found by the twenty-first, who takes a slightly different view of the place.
Has anything like that ever happened to you?
Yes, of course. When you observe the transformations of chemically peculiar stars, you can determine with great accuracy how quickly they revolve. I got to wondering what would happen if the astronomical cycles of the stars were to change. This is a pretty crazy idea, because a star is a proper piece of matter that is very difficult to deflect or slow down. Yet I succeeded in finding several stars where this occurred.
How can this be?
We still don't know exactly. The question is whether it applies to whole stars. If the answer is yes, this goes against the laws of physics. It seems that our idea of a star as something compact might not be the whole truth. It is more than likely that the actual compact star is hidden somewhere inside, beneath a thin outer shell which moves against the star and so may slow down or speed up in comparison to the rate of revolution of the inside. You see here how nature can spring surprises – no one would have imagined anything like this.
What do you say to the multiverse hypothesis – that apart from our universe there exist other, parallel universes?
It is the result of interesting deliberations. The universe is governed by a few physical laws, which contain, apart from basic relations, a number of constants. It would be enough for these to be slightly different for the universe to be completely different. Without stars, for instance. And stars are very important because they produce heavy chemical elements from which the next generations of stars produce planetary systems. Then in some of these there are planets that are capable of supporting life. In order that life can really evolve on them, what is needed is a star that produces the right amounts of warmth and light, like our sun. Without this it would not work: the universe would be made up of just hydrogen and helium. When you think about it, you realize there are a great many coincidences. If the chain were broken somewhere, there would be nothing – no people, and no astronomers to think about it all. This brings us back to our question: what if ours is not the only universe, and the other universes have their own physical laws? There's a catch in this hypothesis. For it to become accepted science, it would have to be somehow demonstrable. And at the moment it isn't. At the moment it is nothing but interesting philosophical speculation.
Do you watch the stars at home, too?
Not at home, no. It's not that I don't take work home with me, but as a rule I sit at a computer. For each hour spent observing, it is necessary to spend five or six hours, and sometimes longer, processing data. So I don't have much desire to perform observations at home. But sometimes you find yourself in places where the sky is especially pretty. I, too, really enjoy a pretty sky, in spite of the fact that after all these years I know the night sky practically inside out. There's no better means of looking at space than the naked eye. A few years ago I was in South America, where for the first time I saw with my own eyes what the night sky is like in the Southern Hemisphere. It was a great adventure just to lie down on the grass and stare at what the sky still had to show me.
As well as watching the sky, you enjoy playing the clarinet. You founded a small orchestra, in fact. How did that happen?
Although I didn't start playing it until I was about eighteen, I got on with the clarinet from the very beginning. Within a year I was a member of an amateur symphony orchestra, and since then I've never stopped playing. Unfortunately that orchestra came to an end, so from what was left of it I put together a chamber orchestra for wind instruments.
Are there any points of contact between this hobby and your work as an astronomer?
Certainly. I very much enjoy working on transcriptions of classical works, where the most important thing is for the lay listener not to notice that he or she is being addressed by ten musicians with wind instruments rather than a large symphony orchestra of sixty members. This means coming up with some kind of model – basically the very thing I do in my work as an astronomer. So I don't have much difficulty switching between the two environments. It's just that sometimes I work with mathematical relations and sometimes with musical notes.
How do you find the time for it? How do you keep up?
I don't really. I have plans for several lives to come.