why aren’t there more astrophysicists?

A beautiful picture of the night sky. Credit: Photo by guille pozzi on Unsplash.

“Man, be careful

not to walk small

underneath the stars.” — Opomena, Antun Branko Šimić (translated from Croatian)

I still remember the first time I saw an illustration of a black hole. It was a pivotal moment in my life, because when my eyes glanced in the direction of a very specific picture book containing all sorts of fun facts about black holes, my life changed forever. At the very mature age of 9, I thought we had everything figured out on Earth: that we knew all there is to know about plants, animals, chemistry, physics, all of it. But space — that was the biggest mystery of them all. Maybe my perception was altered by the fact that there was a seeming abundance of books, shows and media about Earth sciences, but a distinct lack of similar content about astronomy.

My mom was happy to buy me the picture book, and it is still on my shelves as a reminder of my curiosity as a kid. I poured over it, reading all the text, hidden flaps with more information, and took in all the illustrations. My curiosity was nothing new — humanity has been fascinated with the night sky since the dawn of time. Those twinkling lights, comets shooting across the sky and planets making loop-de-loops in their retrograde motion caught our attention forever.

I set my life mission to be discovering the universe. I worked hard for almost 10 years now, building a knowledge fortress of math, physics, programming and astronomy knowledge, competing in astronomy in Croatia as well as internationally, doing research and getting published before college. My goal was not to be small underneath the stars, but to come closer to them and discover all their secrets. However, throughout this incredible journey, I’ve noticed many things about how we as a society portray astronomy and astrophysics, and all of them are not great.

While discussing the space industry and research in astronomy during a geography class in the last weeks of high school, I’ve come to realize some of my classmates didn’t know the correct order of planets in our solar system. I don’t even blame them — the first and last time astronomy is discussed in our school curriculum here in Croatia is in 5th grade of middle school. While the department of education organizes an astronomy competition, every time I told someone what competition I go to or that I went to an astronomy olympiad, or that my major is a Bachelors in Astronomy the response is “that exists?”

Astronomy and space news makes up less than 2% of all published media 1. Even though it is extremely eye catching — beautiful images, engaging content and general curiosity — it is still extremely underrepresented. Most of the time astronomy articles are in a specialized section of a magazine or web version of a news outlet, making it harder for people to read about it. Astronomy news rarely ever makes the front cover of a magazine or is the first article you see on a news page. That space is only reserved for news that has pretty pictures, something people can observe, or has an impact on humanity 2. Most famously, the Hubble space telescope, JWST, Vera Rubin observatory and the EHT telescope that took the first picture of a black hole all dominated news outlets because of the enormous value they have for astronomy. But, most people don’t really know about extremely important telescopes or instruments such as the Gaia telescope, Chandra X-ray, Kepler and TESS, Euclid, Spitzer, Parker Solar Probe and so on. Other than only astronomy news being overshadowed by other areas, there is extremely little coverage of competitions or olympiads in astronomy. While coverage differs from country to country, it is not very common to be big news, as countries like the USA, the UK or Canada don’t get featured in news articles but rather niche olympiad-related websites, but in India, Armenia, Bangladesh, Slovenia, Iran or Romania there is coverage from some big news outlets. In Croatia, there is no media coverage of the IOAA, only the results posted on our observatory’s website and one Facebook post with 4 likes. I find the last fact especially depressing.

However, one of the main issues I see with the current amount of astronomy media is how little it focuses on real research or deep explanations. Whenever I need to look for information about a certain topic, I always have to rely on professional journals, as there often aren’t any tutorials, explainers, videos and such. I’ve noticed that most content about astronomy is very simple explainers about general topics that everyone is curious about, but for a learner who wants to take the next step, there is only blank space. As a kid in high school, doing everything the extremely long way was very hard. I struggled so much with understanding really difficult stuff, because the only way I could learn about something at 15 was by reading college textbooks and books from the last century. Without generative AI like ChatGPT or Claude I would never have gotten this far — who would be patient enough to explain the same concept to me 5 times before I understood it? Or help me code something that has literally only 1 article published about? Or help with all of my preparation for the IOAA, along with 10 textbooks and sheer will? I liked to push the boundaries of what I could do with the little I had, but I don’t want my experience to have to be everyone else’s as well.

Astronomy and astrophysics are presented as fascinating areas to talk about and watch, but not as real career paths that people want to pursue.

All of the faults I mentioned above are the reasons why I started writing here. I want everyone who ever loved space and wanted to pursue it, but felt like they had no support, to have someone cheer for them and help them. I’ve had so many people tell me that what I study is the coolest thing ever, that they wanted to be astronomers when they were kids, or that they wish they would be able to change careers. With this page, I want to be that 0.00000000000001% extra media coverage that convinces you to pursue studying the universe.

1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.1755 , 1.6.2026.

2 https://aas.org/press/what-makes-astronomy-story-newsworthy

You can also read this on my Substack: https://emadonev.substack.com/p/why-arent-there-more-astrophysicists?r=4g9gxo