Earlier this year, a crew working for the Japanese public broadcasting organization NHK visited me at Case Western Reserve University. They interviewed me for their TV show Cosmic Front Next, for an one-hour episode about Globular Clusters featuring a variety of astronomers. I spoke about how the Milky Way might have acquired its system of globular clusters and their connection to the Vast Polar Structure. It was particularly interesting to see how efficiently and thoroughly they re-decorated my office to give it a moody dark-blue light and astronomy-inspired background.
The episode on Globular Clusters has now been broadcasted during their season 5, and NHK kindly send me a DVD. They even produced nice animations illustrating some of the concepts I talked about. What’s particularly funny: they also interviewed my old grad school friend Andreas at Columbia University, and the two of us were featured right after another.
Explaining the concept of dynamical friction acting onto a satellite galaxy as it orbits the Milky Way.
They asked me to pose for some establishing shots, in particular they wanted me to read something in our department’s library. So I picked every dynamicist’s bible.