This TED Talk features urban astrophysicist Federica Bianco, recorded live at TED 2019.

I am an astrophysicist. I research stellar explosions across the universe, but I have a flaw.

I'm restless, and I get bored easily. And although as an astrophysicist I have the incredible opportunity to study the entire universe,

the thought of doing only that, always that, makes me feel caged and limited.

What if my issues with keeping attention and getting bored were not a flogel?

What if I could turn them into an asset?

An astrophysicist cannot touch or interact with the things that she studies.

No way to explode a star in a lab to figure out why or how it blew up.

Just pictures and movies of the sky.

Everything we know about the universe, from the Big

Bang that originated space and time, to the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies, to the

structure of our own solar system, we figured out studying images of the sky. And to study a system

as complex as the entire universe,

astrophysicists are experts at extracting simple models and solutions

from large and complex datasets.

So what else can I do with these expertise?

What if we turn the camera around towards us?

At the urban observatory, that is exactly what we're doing.

Greg Dobler, also an astrophysicist and my husband,

created the first urban observatory at New York University in 2013,

and I joined in 2015.

Here are some of the things that we do. We take pictures of the city at night and study city lights like stars.

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