Life on Other Planets by Aomawa Shields PhD

Author:Aomawa Shields, PhD [Shields, Aomawa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Ice

For my dissertation, I knew that I wanted to study something about planets around other stars, though I didn’t know what, exactly. I needed to come up with a scientific question to try to answer. While I had been gone from astronomy, the field had exploded. In 1995 we knew of one planet orbiting a main-sequence star outside of our solar system. Now, in 2011, there were over a thousand.

And there were at least that many questions about each of the planets that had been discovered. Were they rocky, like the Earth? Or gaseous, like Jupiter? Or were they somewhere in between? Why had they formed as they did, in the arrangement they did? What were their atmospheres like? Their surfaces? Were they capable of supporting life? What kind of life? Did any of them host life now?

I was curious about all these questions, and addressing any one of them would require multiple dissertations, if not lifetimes. I needed to find something specific and bounded to study, and it had to be something that didn’t just make me curious. I needed to be personally invested. I had gotten to the point, upon passing the qual, where I had started to believe that I could do this—this science thing. If I worked hard enough at it, I saw results. It was math. A (my mature, thirty-four-year-old self) + B (working my ass off) = C (getting the grades to move forward). I knew it would be the same thing with research.

But all of that was external. I had been basing my ability to succeed on external metrics for success—grades in courses, grades on exams (including the big, scary qual). I’d been thinking like this for years. Research, too, had been and would continue to be that way, my success based on my advisor’s assessment of my progress—how well I learned to use a given research technique or programming language, how often I produced results and shared them in group meetings and wrote them up for publication, how well I communicated my results to the broader astronomy community at conferences.

But this dissertation was something that I would be doing, day in and day out, for the next three-plus years of my life. I knew that I would need to find more to sustain my enthusiasm for the topic than the external markers of success that were inherent to my continued progress and assessment. My advisor, my peers, the larger exoplanet community—none of these were going to be at my bedside at 7 a.m. every day of those next three-plus years, whispering in my ear to wake up, eat breakfast, take a shower, and get to work. I was going to have to do that all by myself. It needed to be personal.

I walked into journal club one afternoon and a senior grad student was presenting a paper. The air went very still, like it did all those years ago in the seventh grade when I saw Space Camp. The paper was about

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