Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Prof. Aomawa Shields, auther of "Life on Other Planets" about the the climate of exoplanets and her unusual path to astronomy.
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When we look back at humanity's path to understanding the universe, it's never a straight line. We sometimes tell the story that way Galileo, Newton, Einstein, et cetera. But the truth is that it's a zig zag set of paths that branch and fade or intersect. It's an unguided exploration through all the possible ways of understanding this beautiful universe. And there's a lesson in that not just about how to learn more about the universe, but how each and every one of us should look at their own path through life. Hi, I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe in which we do exactly that, try to understand and explain the entire universe to you. We think that everything out there deserves understanding, and everyone out there deserves to understand the nature of the universe, both all of the beautiful and glorious mysteries that we have unraveled and the mysteries that remain, the questions that stand unanswered. We want to take you to the forefront of knowledge and help you understand what we do and do not know. And something that we talk about a lot on the podcast is that science is of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's not some huge, impersonal institution pumping out knowledge. It's just a bunch of people being curious about the world and dedicating their lives to try to scratch that itch. To figuring it out. So when you read a study about how spiders fight wasps or how Chris sulls forming clouds on venus, you should think about the person behind that study, the person who spent years squatting in damp forests watching spiders or building a sensor that would fly on a mission of venus. There's a life there, a human who decided to do that instead of becoming a novelist or a hedge fund zillionaire. In science as we know it emerges out of all that the same way that the tuing and throwing of the little particles somehow weaves itself together to emerge as a rock or a baseball when you zoom out, all of those people working in their little niches weave themselves together to move science forward. But it's never a straight line. It's always a zigzag as science lurches from one idea to another. And it's also a zigzag for the individuals involved, the people who are succeeding or struggling, winning awards or nearly dropping out the path of an individual scientist. How they find their niche and figure out a way to contribut it requires luck and creativity, the same way research does, and today on the podcast, I want to dive into a fascinating story that weaves those two threads together. My friend and colleague, Professor Iau Mowa Shields, who studies the atmosphere of exoplanets, has written a gorgeous book about her science and her life and her very unusual path to being an astronomy professor. And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about Life on Other Planets, the story of Iaou Mowa Shields. All right, it's my great pleasure to introduce the podcast Professor A. Moa Shields, my friend and colleague here at UC Arline. My Professor Shields has her PhD from the University of Washington and then she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. She's been a Covely Fellow and a Ted Fellow, and she now holds the Claire Booth Loose Assistant Professorship at UC Irvine that she was recently promoted to tenure. Well, welcome to the podcast, and thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
I've been very much looking forward to talking to you about this wonderful book you wrote, Life on Other Planets. I love how weavesing your research story and your personal story, and it tells us so much about life on other planets and life on this planet. And so I was hoping to talk to you first about your science and then getting a little bit more into your personal story.
I love that.
So the question that seems to motivate your science is basically, where can we live or where can life exist on planets in our universe? Is that the thing that drives you.
It is that old question are we alone? In the universe?
I have filtered it a little bit more through my own lens, you know, like which is how do we choose planets to target and prioritize in that quest to answer the question are we alone? And the thing the way that I do it, the way that my team does it is once the planet is found by the observers, and of course finding that planet is super hard. That's a euphemism really, I mean, it's as I mentioned in the Ted talk, it's like trying to, you know, figure out what color a fruit fly is on a headlight.
That's you know, trillions of miles away.
That sounds easy do it in a day?
So like that that I don't mean to underestimate it all the amount of work that observers have to take. However, once that work is done and they found a planet that exists in a particular region of space around its star that we call the habitable zone, that's only.
The first step.
Because just because a planet is in the habitable zone doesn't mean that it's habitable, And just because it's habitable doesn't mean it's inhabited. Like, let's be clear about that, because often that that gets confused in the media. But like, you know, we find a planet that's in the habitable zone, that doesn't mean that we know anything about what kind of atmosphere it has, or what kind of surface it has, or what kind of environment that it really has that might allow liquid water to stay liquid on the surface. And that really is our overwhelming criterion for habitability. When we say, you know, let's look for other habitable planets, it's let's look for planets that might be warm enough.
To have liquid water.
Because we know on our planet, everywhere there's water, there's life, and every single life form from the tiniest microbe to the largest elephant, requires liquid water to survive.
So you're starting from the planets that other folks have found all this list of five thousand or so exoplanets we've discovered so far, and you're trying to figure out which ones to focus in on to understand whether there's water on them.
Yes, because from that subset of five thousand plus planets that we've found, maybe a few dozen of them to maybe tens of them are in the habitable zone. And we're going to keep finding more and more of these potentially habitable planets because we now have another satellite, another observatory called TESTS, the Transiting Survey Exoplanet Survey satellite, and it's already found additional planets it's going to be finding more. So we find this, we get a planet that's been discovered and we don't know anything about for the Earth size planets, what's actually in their atmospheres. So what my team can do is we can use climate models that were historically used to predict climate and weather on the Earth to predict climate and weather on exoplanets, and we can say, okay, we don't know anything about this planet's atmosphere or surface, what kind of atmosphere or surface would it require to have above freezing.
Surface temperatures for liquid water?
If we throw an Earth atmosphere, Earth like atmosphere at this planet and run our simulations. Is it habitable? Is it warm enough for liquid water? And if it is, that's a result. If it's not, it's what kind of atmosphere? Would it need a little more carbon dioxide? Because you know, while on our our planet we have way too much carbon dioxide, other planets might actually benefit from it if they're on the colder side.
And I have to make this very.
Clear when I talk to my students, because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. By definition, a greenhouse gas is a gas that both absorbs and emits infrared radiation. And on our planet, we we're no longer in energy balance because we have now added to our current complement of CO two and that's us doing that, and so we have more than we need.
We don't need any more. We're hurting ourselves.
For other planets, CO two can be a benefit if they are way out the outer edges of the habitable zone are even farther outside, because greenhouse gases warm things up. So we can figure out what kind of atmosphere a planet would need and what kind of surface, because surfaces also have their own different reflective properties, and they can absorb different kinds of light from stars. And we do this for planets that have been discovered, can say, Okay, how habitable is this planet?
Really? Over it?
And the planets that are the most habitable over the widest range of different atmospheres and surface types and shapes of their orbit and axial tilts, those are the planets that we'd want observers to put at the top of their list to look at with these next generation telescopes to try to find evidence of life.
So you mentioned that twice now, the putting things at the top of their list or focusing on things. Why do we need to do that? I mean, we all have only a few thousand of these planets. Why don't we just look at all of them to prioritize.
Yeah, and I wish we could, and I'd love it if we could. Unfortunately, we don't have infinite telescope time. We can't follow up on every single potentially habitable planet to look for signs of life in their atmospheres and its atmosphere.
And so we do need to do this prioritization, especially given that we're going to continue to find more and more.
So what kind of observations. Are we talking about the original observations that discover the exoplane that is there are not the same kind as the ones that can tell us about the atmosphere.
That's right, Yes, So finding a planet in space we have different choices. We have maybe five techniques and the techniques that all that are finding most of the planets these days are something called radial velocity and the transit technique. Most of the planets we found have been used using the transit technique, and that is we look at light that's coming from a star and if there's a planet around that star that we see transit, you know, go in front of that star from our viewing angle. We know all planets transit their stars, but we may not see the transit. It depends on if we're lined up in such a way that we can. And when we do, we see the light dip because something a planet is passing in front of it and it's taking a little chunk of light out of that star.
It's a mini eclipse, right that eclipse.
Yeah, and we can measure that the depth of that eclipse, the depth of that transit, and that tells us information about the planet, like how large the planet is, but it doesn't tell us anything about what's in that planet's atmosphere. To do that, we need another kind of technique called using a spectroscopy. That technique is employed by Jane's webspace telescope, and we'll be employed by other future missions as well, And that is when we can sort of measure. Again, we're measuring light coming from a star, but if the planet is lined up in such a way from our viewing angle, we see that starlight filtered through the planet's atmosphere, and that starlight little chunks of it are taken out by atmospheric molecules that exist on that planet, and we can look at those chunks of light taken out and match those to where we know certain atmospheric gases absorb. We know that from the laboratory measurements, measurements of our own sun, and that can tell us what's in the atmospheres of the planets that are transiting these stars.
So each of our telescopes is sort of good at something like we have ones that are good at finding these exoplanets, and then another one you would use to follow up to measure the atmospheric signals of that planet. You can't do both with the same telescope.
Usually not.
And this, you know, this technique of transit transmission spectroscopy is this fancy word for that kind of a technique. When we're looking for atmospheric fingerprints of life, those fingerprints we call bio signatures or biomarkers. Sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but it's basically biologically generated global impacts to a planet's atmosphere or surface.
That doesn't have to be the atmosphere.
People are really big on the atmosphere because they think that's probably all that we're going to be able to see, if that at all Earth planets. But a lot of my work, as you know from the book, has been about saying the surface matters.
You know you can, and you can't assume that it doesn't.
And we've been able to prove with our simulations that in fact, it matters a lot.
So are we looking for habitable planets planets that might have water and service gravity that's reasonable, et cetera. Or are we looking for biosignatures of inhabited planets or both.
Ultimately it's the biosignatures that would allow us to answer that question how we're going to answer are we alone? While it's finding something, measuring something that life could excrete into the atmosphere or onto the surface, that tells us only life can do that. And coming up with that recipe of gases that only life together could produce is its own sub field of astronomy and astrobiology. That's not what I do, but it is crucial to that enterprise. Is Okay, what are we going to look for? Not just what are we going to look at?
So once we've discovered this planet, then your job is essentially figure out whether it's likely to have the conditions for life by simulating possible scenarios and seeing whether they fit the data that we know about the planet.
Yes, that's exactly what I do, alongside another part of our work, which is not necessarily having a planet that has been discovered to work with. So one of the fun things I enjoy doing is creating fictional planets that I don't know that might exist, but that could, you know, like a hypothetical planet. So we say, let's put a planet around a different type of star than the Sun, which therefore emits a different type of light overall, and see what.
The planet's climate does.
That was really what my dissertation work was all about is let's put planets around different types of stars and see if their climates would be different. And yes, they would be, and we got to show.
How and why.
And now as a professor, we ask questions like, could there be a planet that exists that has too hot of a day side it's a permanent day side, too hot of a night side that's a permanent night side, and only a habitable surface environment along the dividing line between them, which the terminator. Could such a planet exist and woul its climate be stable? And in my post, dot Ana Lobo showed that that kind of climate can in fact be stable, and it's more likely to exist around a drier planet than a wetter planet. And I love doing that kind of stuff because it allows me to turn knobs and see what factors are really the most critical to governing habitability and to realize that these environments could exist out. Not only could they exist out in the universe, but they could be more conducive to supporting life than the more traditional kinds of environments that we're used to seeing within our own Solar system.
Can you talk for a little bit about the role of simulations here because I think listeners are hearing that you start with some parameters of a planet, but then you're doing some sort of calculation to figure out like what's likely to be there. How do we go from here's the structure of a planet to understanding what its climate might look like. I mean, we can't even predict the weather here in southern California. How can we predict the atmosphere of anxcit.
Well, it requires us to make sure that our models work, that they're valid for a given set of circumstances. So we our models always have to be validated for the one planet whose climate we can be fairly certain within a twenty four hour period, or you know, to be relatively stable. And of course it's the climate is different than the weather. Let's be clear about that. So like, yes, weather is very variable over a span of hours, let alone days, but the overall climate of our planet has been relatively stable over hundreds thousands of years, and we have largely we have different reasons for that. Some of the reasons include the kind of axle tilt we have, the fact that we have a certain obliquity that allows our planet not to swing wildly in that regard we also have a moon. People have thought that, you know that that of course helps us to help the obliquity to be stable. There have been some simulations to show that without a moon we probably wouldn't vary as wildly in obliquity as was once thought. But those aspects and the fact that we have a silicate weathering feedback. We have a carbonate silicate cycle which when there's a lot of precipitation that washes CO two out of the atmosphere, locks it into rocks and cools temperatures. And then when temperatures get too cool, we got volcanoes that outgas CO two back into the atmosphere and warm temperatures. So we have this built in feedback that allows our climate to be relatively stable over long time scales, so we can predict our climate relatively straightforwardly with these models. You're absolutely right that with these exoplanets, you know, how can we propose to predict their climates with these models?
We don't. First of all, we don't know what their atmospheres are like.
That's why our work is so important because we can say, okay, so let's run a whole suite of different atmospheres and see what the climates would be. But there is a key thing that we can't prove yet that exoplanets have, and that is this carbonate silicon cycle that's pretty important, and the habitable zone, this region of space around each star. It assumes that we do have a carbonate silicon cycle on these extra planets. And the fact is that's why the habitable zone is a first order approximation and it's self limiting because it assumes circular orbits of planets. We have many, many planets elsewhere around other stars that have very very eccentric orbits and certainly beyond zero, and we have no proof that any kind of silicate weather and feedback is active on these planets to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide and precipitation in our atmosphere with temperature. But we have to assume that it is for these climate models. So we assume that there is like a we start with an Earth and we can simulate our planet and say run your model and do you get an atmosphere a surface temperature pattern similar to what's actually here on Earth and has been measured with satellites. You do, Okay, great, we know the model is valid. Now what are we going to change. Let's change the star and have an actual spectrum of the star that the planet is orbiting. We can put that in and all the different sellar properties and to some degree, and then the planet's properties that we know of, like it's radius, maybe it's mass, if we've gotten Doppler measurements as well, and then we are filling in the gaps. And that's why I'm so big on theoretical simulations as well, because without those, the amount of things we would know about exoplanets would be you could count on one hand, right, we need to be able to fill the gaps between what we do not know and what we need to know to be able to come closer to answering this question about these environments. So yeah, it's important. We can't sort of put a paper out and say this planet has this atmosphere, has this surface, and is habitable. But we can say this planet, if it has this atmosphere, if it has this surface, or if it has this set of atmospheres, here's how habitable it would be. And that allows for the range of possible atmospheric and surface and dynamical environments that might exist around this planet while also being able to quantify their impact on habitability.
And then can you analyze more deeply once you have the spectrum. Now you've looked at the planet, you have the spectrum, you have an idea of what's there. Does that allow you to model what's going on over there and have a deeper sense of whether it's habitable or maybe even inhabited.
So you mean once we were to get some kind of a transit transmission spectroscopy that measurements, yeah, yeah, I mean we've been able to do this with James Web.
And this was a surprise as far as I know. Back five ten years.
Ago when people were talking about JAWST and what it would be able to do for Earths, those are pretty short sentences, you know.
People were like, that's going to be able.
To do some stuff for the larger like Jupiter sized planets, But people were very skeptical about how much information we'd be able to get out of James Web when it comes to Earth's And it turns out we're surprising ourselves because not only have we confirmed the discovery of Earth sized planets with James Web, we've also measured atmospheric constituents of you in Earth sized planet's atmospheres. Now, I believe that those measurements are some additional measurements that were taken earlier this year. And the point is that we are able to, you know, to start to get this kind of information for a smaller region or a smaller regime of planets than I think we thought, and we're doing it already. So if we were to get you know, a spectrum from an Earth, you know, an Earth around another star and it had these sort of whether it's carbon based molecules like methane, it becomes the question of what is going to tell us exactly that life's there, and that is that's an ongoing quest. You know, It's like you need methane along with oxygen, perhaps maybe ozone two, maybe some other kind of lesser known gases like dimethyl sulfide, things that come from plankton. That there are people that are that are thinking about all of these different I said recipe earlier, these different kind of combinations of gases.
But if we were if we were to come up with.
This like set of these different gases that would say that and we could say only life can do that, then yeah, we would have answered this question I have lots more questions for our guests, but first let's take a quick break.
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Okay, we're back and I'm talking to professor ow was Shields, Professor of astronomy at UC Irvine, about her book Life on Other Planets. I love how you describe sort of fleshing out the habitable zone from a first order approximation. Like the simplest calculation is just where is there enough solar radiation to melt water and to make sure it's not steam. But as you say that, it's more subtle than that, Right, it depends on so many details. One planet would be habitable if it was closer in. Another planet would be habitable is further out. So the habitable zone has to depend on the planet, right, the size of the planet certainly, the atmosphere and its surface. So can you, in broad strokes, give us an understanding and what we've learned about habitability of planets, like what conditions are required beyond just like you have to be in some zone around your star.
Yeah.
When I was a grad student, my advisor, the Keud Meadows, had this workshop where she invited everyone who she knew who worked on habitability to Seattle and we all like sort of stayed in about three different rooms at a conference center and hashed out this question of what are all of the different factors that can influence the long term presence of surface liquid water on a planet, and we came up with this very intricate web and I still show it in my talks today and it always gets like this sort of gasp from students or like or a or an oh, like that, because it is overwhelming. And that's really the point of the showing that slide is that we are meant to be overwhelmed. There are a lot of factors that can influence that. You know, that that criterion of surface liquid water, yes, planetary distance from a star, which is what the habitable zone is, you know, is that expression of that's one and broader stellar environment that could be stellar activity and you know rotation rate of the star and of course planetary rotation rates. So there's stellar environment, there's planetary environment, there's stellar effects, there's planetary there's you know, the dyna dynamics of the planet's environment, whether there are siblings, like whether planets planets can push and pull on each other, and just like our own Solar System, planets are often not alone in their systems.
And so there's the gravitational effects.
There's how reflective different surfaces are, there's how the age all.
Right, of the system itself.
This web of different factors is something that many of us in the field of exoplanet climatology have been slowly chipping away at for the last I would say, like, you know, fifteen twenty years that we've been people have been doing this, and we still don't know what are the most critical factors. I mean, there are sort of the heavy hitters, like how much light you get from your star, because yeah, it's true, if you put a planet, no matter how much atmosphere it's got, how thick, what's its composition, you put it far enough away from a star and it will freeze. So like stellar distance, our planetary distance from us star matters, and the atmosphere, of course, the composition of the atmosphere is a critical piece as well. But we one thing that we've seen from this web and from kind of looking at different aspects is that it's a lot more complex than orbital distance. It's a lot more complex even than atmospheric composition. You know, you change one factor about a planet and it can change everything about its future. And that that's important for us to know for our own planet. And I think it also can drive home that reality of how lucky we all are that we're on a planet that, for whatever reason, all the different possible combinations kind of that combination generated something that allowed life to start here.
So as you survey like the parameter space of planets, does that make you feel like we are unusual or do you feel like, oh, there's lots of ways that a planet could end up with liquid water in the surface, or do you feel like, wow, it's an exquisite balance.
It was the second option you mentioned. It's the one about there's a lot of ways to do it. I mean, we've had books written about how rare some scientists think this planet is.
There's a book called Rare Earth that was.
Written by Peter Warden Don Brownlee that really talk about how it was a super rare thing to have happened the way it happened, and it's probably not going to happen much or have happened much elsewhere.
I take a different view because you know, when.
We think about, for example, seventy percent of all stars in the galaxy are not like the Sun. They are these small, cool m stars, And the great thing about that is that they're so numerous that we may end up finding that next habitable planet around an M. We have got a lot of opportunities to do that, and it's easier to find planets.
Around these stars.
There's a lot of pros, but one of the cons is that these stars are very long lived. None of them have ever died because their lifetimes are longer than the current age of the universe. They have lifetimes of hundreds of billions and in some cases trillions of years. I actually find myself wanting to ask you questions about the latest results about James Webb, which says which will challenge how old the universe really is, But I'm going off of like what we have known, you know, to date, which is slightly less than fourteen billion years. And so these because these stars are so long lived, they can be very active for a really long time. And I always use that, I think I used it in the book to that analogy of like the Terrible twos phase for stars.
This Terrible twos phase.
Can last for billions of years, and during that time any planets that formed around these stars could be pelted with harmful X ray UV radiation. And this often comes up in a talk when people ask that you know, how likely do you think it is to find life on a planet orbiting an m star, given that that life could be subjected to that kind of environment, and I say, well, yeah, that could be a problem. Seriously, There's been a lot of papers that talk about this. However, we see life at the bottom in deep ocean hydrothermal vent environments on Earth.
Life finds a way.
So that is an example of how many different ways life can survive. And that's one of the reasons why I think that we could end up finding life within our own Solar system. And we've got moons right at Jupiter's moon Europa, where we know there's liquid water. It's underneath an ice crust, but it's there, and we're going to go back and actually drill something through the ice and see if we can find anything swimming around in there. And Saturn's moon Enceladus. We've got examples within our own solar system of places that could be habitable and or do fit the criterion for hosting liquid water, not on their surfaces, so it's subsurface.
But mincing words.
Tell us a little bit more about the role of the surface, because I think that's something a lot of people haven't thought about or heard about. I loved how you treated it in the book. What is the importance of having the right surface on your planet to make it habitable?
It is important a lot of the times that in these models we assume there's an ocean, and we often go one step further and assume that ocean is a slab ocean, which means it's like fifty meters deep and there's.
No ocean heat flux. And we do that.
There's justifiable reasons for doing that. First of all, we're not going to be able to get any kind of bathometric information about an exoplanet anytime soon, and simulating a four thousand meter deep ocean takes a lot longer than a fifty meter slab ocean. And people there are exoplanet astronomers that are looking at the role of ocean circulation on habitability and that's important too, And those models take months to run. So it can be very useful as long as you're willing to say, Okay, here are the results using a slab ocean, and if we assume there's ocean heat flux and a depth there, here's how the results might change. You know. As long as we include that, then we can make sure that we've communicated some meaningful science and information whilst also being able to generate a lot of simulations and go in depth in terms of the climate and atmospheric dynamics involved. But the thing is that this is a generalized and highly idealized scenario to assume a planet has ocean and nothing else. In reality, we step out our front door and we see how much more surface topography and compositional variety there exists, you know, within this planet. We have to be able to move in that direction when it comes to simulating exoplanet environments. So what we do is we start with, Okay, we know that an ocean is very absorptive across the EM spectrum. It's just if you were to look at this a plot of you know how reflective ocean is, it's just a straight line across most wavelengths. But that's not the case for other surfaces. If you put water ice on a surface, water ice, as I'm very big and talking about in the book, is extremely absorptive of a type of radiation that's longer red or wavelengths infrared and very reflective of visible and near UV radiation. And that basic principle, that basic phenomenon about water ice and about the vibrational modes of the water molecule. When you apply that to host stars which emit different types of light, and you think about that interaction, it completely affects planetary climate and habitability. So you know, we have quantified that we've changed the surface and say, okay, say.
It's land, Well what kind of land?
You know?
It could be a clay, it could be calcite, it could be graphied, it could be you know, a different kind of combination of basalt. And each of those surfaces have their own wavelength dependent properties and behave different ways depending on what kind of light they receive from their host star environments. So we have been able to do this kind of work for not only water ice, but also ice that have has a lot of salt in it, because it turns out if temperatures get cold enough, there can be and there's a little bit of salt in the ocean, well there's a lot, but if even is a little bit, that salt can precipitate to the top of that layer and form a crust so reflective it's even more reflective than snow. And no one had applied that phenomenon to looking at exoplanets and deciding, you know, could these exoplanets, even in the habitable zone get cold enough on their surfaces for this type of ice to form. And we were able to show that yes, they could, even in the habitable zone, and that climate models needed to incorporate parameterizations for the formation of these types of surfaces if they wanted to really produce accurate assessments of planetary habitability. And so we did that for different land surfaces as well, and now we're looking at alternative ices like, of course you can get cold enough for not only water ice to form, but or this sort of salty ice, but carbon.
Dioxide ice, methane ice, ammonia ies.
And people in the past have thought, you know, who cares about that, because if if the planet's that far away from the star that it gets that cold enough, like it's not going to be habitable, like why would we even want to invest money? And that it turns out that these planets, if they're eccentric, yes they can get far enough away from their star, if they can also get very very close to their star, and they can go in and out of that traditional habitable zone, and you know what.
Would that do for life?
Could you have a planet whose atmosphere, entire atmosphere like condenses out on the surface at its farthest point from the star, which we call appo astron, and then like sublimates back into the atmosphere at periastron at the closest approach. You know, and people are you know, hadn't really thought about that beyond the sheer fact that yes, the planet can go in and out of the state, But what would that do to the actual atmosphere, Like, we're starting to be able to simulate that and look at the optical and other properties of these ices. You know, that could form and then supplemate back into the sky and the atmosphere and then form again.
Well, I love that you're not just ruling out candidates. You're also opening the door. You're like, oh, there are other ways to make habitable planets, things that we might have not considered. That's very cool, And I love seeing the sort of errative process of science in action. You start from a simple model, and you ad bills and you add whistles, and you keep making things more and more realistic. How far do you think we are from like really having anything that describes those planets and how confident would you be that our model is describing anything that's happening over there, or do you feel like, wow, there's so much complexity. We still haven't added that. Really, it's still a big question.
The main uncertainties that I would want to prioritize really is there are two models. These climate models have historically been I want to say bad at but that's we're still struggling with cloud microphysics. So really, how clouds are formed on these plant and it's how they change, how their properties are expressed within the model, because clouds, you know, they form at different heights. We have low clouds, medium clouds, high clouds on our planet, and we're just talking about water clouds, and of course getting into other types of compositional cloud microphysics as something else, but really, how you form these droplets, how drop how the cloud droplets are parameterized in a model is something that still requires a lot of work. And the other thing is this surface compositional complexity, because still where we're at is being able to say, okay, we're putting large swaths of a type of surface over here, and large swaths of a type of surface over here, but being able to really incorporate a complex surface environment where we have vegetation and different land surfaces and ice and ocean and topography and orography. Putting that all in to a model is important. We can do it with the Earth's environment, but anything, you know, having some idea of how if we changed that different combination or that different orientation for both surfaces and and topography, for example, and how that would influence climate weather patterns, atmospheric circulation, wind circulation, that remains to be seen. And we need to be able to do that in a much more smoother, much more systematic way. And right now it's pretty clunky.
Okay, I want to get more into that, but first let's take another break.
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And we're talking to Professor Auamawa Shields about her book Life on Other Planets, her research into exoplanets, and the story of how she got where she is awesome. Well, thanks so much for telling us about your science. I'd love to know talk a little bit about your story about how you got to where you are, how you got to be who you are, If that's all right, take us back to your sort of original inspiration, like what is it that got you young Oa Moha into science thinking that this was going to be the path for you.
As long as I can remember, I have been that person who was looking up. And I always preferred looking up to looking straight ahead. And as I wrote in the book, I was often bumping into things on the street because I was My neck was craved up. So like I grew up in a part of the country, you know, in the US where there was a lot of.
There are planes being flown.
My grandmother worked at Miramar Air Force Base and that was where the Blue Angels, the aerial flight team were stationed, and so we used to go to Blue Angels shows on the week kends and we'd see these amazing planes doing these just like death defying acts, and that was like that.
Was football for us.
We were tailgate and like sit on the on the lawns and look at these planes. And and that was also mer Mar was also where Top Gun was shot and was filmed, and I remember seeing that movie and being very inspired by Kelly mcgilliss's character, who was an astrophysicist and just an all around badass. You know.
It was just like, that's who I want.
And then it kind of all came together when I saw this movie called Space Camp, which, though not an OSCAR contender, it.
Was like very very influential for me, you know.
You know. It was like, if kids can get launch into space, then I thought, like I was a kid, it could happen for me. And that's like when I decided I was going to be an astronaut.
So not a scientist, you wanted to be an astronaut.
Yes, that's right, it was an astronaut. And in my mind it was, Okay, I'm going to go to space and I'm going to study space. So then I put two and two together and said, okay, because I knew I had to study something before I applied to NASA.
That much.
I knew at the age of twelve, and so I was like, well, I'm going to study the thing that I want to go to. So that told me from looking that up in the World Book encyclopedias that we had at home that that meant astronomy, studying space meant studying astronomy. Then the two and two they, I mean, they went hand in hand, and they did for that the next few years until I ended up stumbling into an audition at the prep school I was going to, which I had decided to go to because they had their own observatory. But when I got there, it was like my second year. I was dragged to an audition for the play Steel Magnolias with some girlfriends and I ended up getting cast.
Like I didn't really care if I got cast, like most.
Of the girls that I knew really wanted to get cast, and I couldn't care less.
I was like, homework break, Sure, I'll go.
And I ended up getting a part, and I realized how much I loved it, you know, And it brought me back to when I was ten and had auditioned for a play at the La Joya Playhouse because we lived there in San Diego and had been an understudy, but really hadn't thought seriously about it. But it's like, once I started to act in high school, kind of thought about how formative those experiences of being on stage were for me, and it became more than just being on stage when I got that part and saw what it took to put together a story, to work with people, to present something that we were then going to share with the world.
Our world was, you know, this school, but it.
Gave me something that I didn't have as a budding astronomer. It gave me that sense of community and connection. Astronomy at that point felt very isolating and something that I did on my own with a telescope, and I loved that. And yet I also had this other aspect of with the acting, of like we worked together day and day out, rehearsing, learning things about each other, using our personal backgrounds to tell a story, and then little people's heads off with that story, you know, in a good way. So like that was the beginning of Okay, I have two things now that I really love to do, and how do I make that work? You know?
And was it hard for you to be in sort of two worlds already? I mean, imagine the drama kids and the space nerds probably didn't have a lot of overlap. Was that weird to be sort of like in two groups of kids and two communities and two sort of sets of you know, life goals in front of those kids.
It's interesting. And at Exeter it wasn't. It wasn't strange. No one ever made me choose or looked at me funny. Because I had I was doing those things. It seemed like it was a it was a wonderful environment to be able to do many things. It wasn't until I got out of that environment and you know, needed to choose a school and got into college and it was like you had to choose a major, and like it became clear that those two things were very far apart, and you know, one was going to have to win. And that was sort of the next phase of it for me. It was, Okay, I'll choose this. I've been wanting to do astronomy and be an astronaut for the longest of the time of the two, so let's stay with that. But one without the other never felt fully right. And I kept going back and forth. And the book is that journey of that of thinking, Okay, I'm going to choose this. That's not working, I'm going to go choose this.
Hmm.
I missed that thing, and you know, and ultimately realizing that it was never about choosing.
It was really more about owning, you know, who I was.
So in the book you talk about how you started grad school you're on this path to become an astronomer or scientist, but after your first year you left. You decided you're going to go the other direction, back into acting. Tell us about that choice. Was that difficult?
Yes, and no, it was very difficult. The way it happened, I was divided. When I started that PhD program, I more I sort of did it on autopilot, because that's what you do, you finish undergrad If you're going to be a scientist, you need that PhD. But I had already recognized at MIT that I needed the arts again in my life, and I had even applied to some acting schools that during my senior year. But I shot for the moon and hadn't gotten into those three schools. And so I was like, all right, I'm being told that it's astrophysics, so I'll do that.
But just because.
I made a choice didn't mean that that dream was going to like listen and like just die, you know. So, like during that first year I was there were four people in my cohort. The other three all lived together. They had invited me to live with them in one in the house, but I was like, no, no, I want to be on my own and I wanted my independence. But what I didn't realize was they were all working on problem sets together, you know, and I was not, so like I immediately set myself up for being a part.
And then I.
Started to sort of daydream about acting and films and stuff. And I did well in certain courses like atomic physics and some other ones, but like, I was struggling in this course called basic Astrophysics, which I always loved to make fun of. But there was that professor who suggested that I consider other career options, and so that was a difficult moment for me, and I thought that that confirmed all the things that all the reasons I was using to feel separate and apart.
I was like, Okay, that confirms it.
Plus I didn't really see many people who looked like me in my environment doing astronomy, so I sort of on the downlow, applied to acting schools again and rode these sort of secret busses to Chicago and got in this time, and so decided to leave. And that's the part that I felt when I said yes and no, because in many ways that part was like such a relief. When I finally decided I was leaving, it was like I didn't want to have that conflict anymore because I saw it as a conflict that's.
Something I hit I needed to work out.
And so, okay, I'm getting signs that I shouldn't be in astronomy, like fine, you know, f it, I'm going to go, but I'm going to go to acting, and that I won't, you know, all done, I don't have any conflict anymore, so that I remember, like it just felt when I was taking the bus to the airport to leave Madison, Wisconsin, it was like it.
Was like, oh, you know, the way to the world was gone.
But of course what I didn't recognize was that, like the way I left, that wasn't a clean break. The reasons I know not only and I can't entirely blame that professor, although I you know, as I write, I would never tell that to a student today.
It's not my job.
It's not my I don't have that power to determine if someone should choose a different career or not.
I don't believe that we as faculty should wield.
That power, but I was the one who listened, and that's on me, you know, And so there was a lot of forgiveness to do, both of that professor and of myself. And it ultimately had to be about going to something, not running away from something, you know. And that's what I discovered later on, when you know, when I chose acting and was like, wow, this is this is hard in a different way. In some ways, it's like it's easy, no problem sets, but a lot, a lot of work and all the things that it didn't seem like science cared about, like my feelings and who I was as long as I could do the problem set or write the paper. Acting cared about a lot, you know, And so I needed to bring up all those experiences from childhood all through you know, through early adulthood and use those to embody these different characters. And it was very challenging and also extremely rewarding.
But again it wasn't on its own.
It was not fully representative of the person that I am, so I had to have that discovery.
Thank you very much for sharing all that. I also want to hear about your path back to science. I know that a lot of our listeners are folks who I've always been interested in science. I've always thought about physics and space, but their life took them some other way, and a lot of them right into me and asked me like, is it unforgiving? Is it possible to get back in? Could I still be a scientist if I'm already thirty, or I'm forty or I'm fifty. Are their paths back into academ it? Tell us about how you forged your path back into academia, because I feel like a lot of people think it's very unforgiving that once you step off it's impossible to get back. Tell us your story about how you decided to come back and how you made it work.
And that's the reason.
One of the main reasons I wrote this book was for others to know that they are not alone, because I felt alone for a long time, and I too get these emails from people who are like, yes, I've always wanted to do this thing, and I haven't known how to put it together with this other thing, you know. And that's such a rewarding aspect of having shared my story in this way, because it's like, we know the more of us. Shame can't survive in community, you know, it only survives and isolation in the vacuum. Once you connect to someone who has your experience or this has been my experience, you know, someone who has also has some aspect of my journey they share. Then I'm no longer alone, you know, and there's absolutely a path back. It might be a challenging one for me. I was gone for over a decade. I say it was exactly eleven years, so it was a solar cycle that I'd been gone from academia, from astronomy in particular.
I was in academia but for acting. So I think, I.
Write that I had been cheating on astronomy with acting, and I hope that astronomy would take me back.
And what I.
Discovered was the biggest obstacle was myself. You know, there's no surprise now in retrospect. But because people were very warm in this second PhD program and then the first one. In fact, most of the people there were very warm too, But the second time around, people were asking me about my background, my non traditional background. I was the one who was saying, can we talk about something else? Like because I you know, I wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist, and I thought that my humanities, you know, that sort of stint I had done with acting like shouldn't be discussed because people might use it as reason to think that I wasn't, you know, a serious scientist. But when I had a mentor tell me, you know, your theater background is your superpower, that changed everything for me because I knew I didn't have to pretend that that didn't exist.
I could again that that owning. I could own it.
And then all of a sudden, I saw all the aspects about science that were you know, very much applicable, where my acting background was super applicable.
So it is true that.
Because I'd been gone for over ten years, some things I had to I felt like I never learned an undergrad, and so I was learning from the ground up and some things I had just forgotten. And so I worked really hard, and I had this a monumental case of imposter syndrome. And I write a lot about it in the book and several version, earlier versions. I think I wrote so much I was like, Okay, I got it, Like got to take some stuff out because it's like, eventually, like we need to have an upward trajectory here and so like it was this trifecta of issues like African American woman in a field dominated by white men, older returning student. I was thirty four when I came back to grad school and classically trained actor, you know, so I had three reasons to feel different.
But this time I did not isolate.
I went after every single mentorship program that was available, and by this time there were a lot more, i think even than back then, and I you know, asked the questions that I was afraid would make me sound stupid. I went to the office hours, you know, because I was older. I actually, here's the thing. Being older, there's a big advantage there, which is there's maturity factor. So like I brought that work experience, that real world experience, and I also was more settled in myself and who I was when I came back to grad school, so I knew I wasn't there to mess around. I knew exactly what I wanted to study.
It wasn't like, you know.
I'm going to go to grad school because that's what you do, and what do I want to Like that was the first time around this time it was like my husband and I had had left very well paying jobs in LA to move up to Seattle.
So I had to.
Want it bad and I did, and that meant, you know, I ended up finishing in five years. The normal amount is six. But I was I was afraid at every point. I was afraid that I was going to you know, confirm stereotypes about my race and my gender and then I would go get an A plus and extraglactic astronomy. You know, I was terrified that I was going to fail the qualifying exam, you know, that fearful, like god awful.
Six hour exam at the time.
Now it doesn't exist at U DUB, but at the time it did, and it was a six hour exam covering thirteen courses.
And two years worth of coursework.
And you know, the two black women who had taken it before I took it, you know, years before, had either fail and failed out of the program or had needed a third time to take it.
And so like, the pressure was like and I kept walking through.
So it was like to the people out there who are like, I have this thing and I'd spent a long time and I don't want I'm afraid, Like it's okay to be afraid.
And you're it's probably good that you're afraid. It means you care.
So what are you going to do about that? You know, we don't want to let the fear keep you from moving through, you know. And that's that's the thing I did the first time. I let the fear kind of paralyze or used it as a justification to do something else which I wouldn't I wouldn't have changed for the world. It's how I became who I was, and how I met my husband and why we have our daughter. Like all these things they work out the way they're supposed to. But now moving forward, like we don't have to let the fear keep us from doing the thing that we're meant to do in the world, you know, and recognizing that, like no human being gets to tell any of us who were supposed to be no human being is that powerful? Just like feel the feelings, feel the fear, and then do the next next indicated action, whether that's fill out the application, you know, ask a mentor for a letter, like just keep moving through those big emotions.
Well, one thing that strikes me about the path of your life is something I think about for many people's lives. For my kids, is that it's something you could never have predicted. You didn't follow an existing track where you could predict exactly what's going to happen.
Dot.
It's a one of a kind life, like many lives are. But I wonder what twenty year old you would think if she could have seen where you are now. Would you think amazing, I got to do both or would she think ooh, that was tough. For What would she think about the path that your life has taken.
I think she would be pretty thrilled and surprised too, you know. And I think the most surprised or the thing that she'd be the most impressed by, is not, you know, the stuff on this on the resume, but that we got to find I'm saying we, me and her, we got to find a way through the difficult feelings because twenty year old me got stuck in them a lot and thought that they were the truth, or thought that the truth lay somewhere out there and someone else, a professor, a guidance counsel, or another student who performed better on that test.
Than I did.
I thought that the truth was someone else's job. And what I've learned is that the answers are usually right here, and you know, it may sound a little cheesy, but it's absolutely the case.
And I still have to remind myself of that.
I'm not always going to remember like oh yeah, yeah, it's I already know what I'm being led to do. But I think that she'd be the most kind of relieved that, like, uh, you know, finally we figured this out, Like because when the answers are somewhere out there, it's like there's no way to be steady for those listening. I'm like moving back and forth like a weather vane. But when the truth is here, then I can be grounded. I like to be influenced by a lot of different philosophies beyond the practice of science, you know, in terms of like especially some Buddhist stuff, you know, And that's this idea of like being mountain solid, that I can be solid in myself no matter and you know, mountains all sorts of weather.
You see it in the.
Mountain ranges, and yet the mountain is the mountain, and like that that's how I can be in my life. I think that's the biggest victory really beyond any material wealth or achievement, is being comfortable in my own skin and knowing that regardless of how things turn out, like, I'm.
Okay, wonderful. Well, now I just want to ask you for a few minutes about the future. Obviously, we're on the cusp of understanding a lot of things about the universe. Where do you see exoplanet research in ten years, in twenty years? Is it impossible to predict because there are so many surprises ahead? What are we going to learn in ten or fifteen years? It's going to blow our minds?
Well, I mean, you know, it's impossible for us as scientists to really make predictions, or at least make predictions with very much, very much of a high percentage of confidence. But I have a belief. Okay, so I'm going to say right up front, this is a belief. This is not grounded in any kind of fact. I need evidence for that, and I don't have it. But knowing what I know about our capabilities and our current instrumentation, I think we're going to get a lot of exciting information in the next fifty years. I think some of that information could include an answer to this question. I've said something recently that I want to share here, which is you know, think about the Apollo missions. We had a president at the time who gave us a mandate, which is to put a human he said man at the time, a man on the Moon by the end of the day decade.
And we did that.
And we did that, and I think you've heard me say this before, but we did that with only a fraction of the world's population at the table allowed to participate at the table. And what I mean by that was, you know, the mission control was largely dominated in terms of gender and race. So what would it be like for someone, perhaps the president of some country, whether it's ours or another country, to say, we are going to not only put a human on the we're going to actually answer this question, maybe even put a human on another planet.
But let's start with answering the question of are we alone.
We're going to answer that question, whether it's by twenty seventy five or twenty one hundred, we're going to do this by this time.
And we allowed.
Every single person to be a part of this journey, regardless of their academic status, regardless of their race, their gender, whether they identify.
As any kind of gender like age.
You know, my Rising Stargirls program allows girls of all colors and backgrounds in the middle school age to create their own NASA inspired depictions of exoplanet environments.
You know, So they're making their own.
Artists depictions in the same way that NASA artists do, and some of their exoplanet art environments are environments that we could actually see out there, and they're making choices about what kind of you know, what kind of vegetation might be there.
You know.
Just because they don't have that necessarily the academic status yet to be able to contribute in a quantifiable way to write a paper, does not mean that they don't possess the amount of imagination that could actually be quite inspirational in this effort. So I think it's important to expand or idea of who gets to participate, and we do that to some degree with citizen science projects. But I think we can learn a lot more about the universe if we invite a lot more people to be a part of it. Well.
That leads directly my second question, which is how do we do that? How do we create more paths or creative students, students that have artistic background, students that have unusual paths, students that are not just white dudes. What do we do to open up this institution to make it easier for people like you coming in the future.
You know what, I want to say that that is probably not my job to answer that question. I think it might be the job of the people who are in the dominant category. And the same way that you know, when we had our Black Lives Matter resurgence in the twenty and twenty twenty, I was grateful that UCI was one of I won't say few, but it was an institution that recognized that it wasn't the job of black people, whether faculty, your students, to devise ways to allow black people to thrive and institutions that The fact is that a lot of us carry a big burden just to be in the instant environments that we're in and to ask us to shoulder the you know, the burden of how do we get more diversity? Here is another burden and another example of how we have less time to do the actual work that we need to be able to stay in these institutions. What I will say is that having a progressive viewpoint and showing that progressive viewpoint to interested students is a start. So university of Washington when I was a prospective student. One of the reasons why I wanted to come there is because they had a broader idea of who a grad student can be. They had people students there who had gone into the Peace Corps before coming back to grad school. One student had gone to pastry school. And so I thought, maybe I'm not as much of a rare magical unicorn as I think I am. You know, so the more we can maybe highlight those sorts of paths, the more people might be gravitate to our departments and say, Okay, there's a place for me here. Role Models are powerful, and a lack of role models is a powerful thing too.
Thank you one, Thank you for being a role model for the future, and thanks for coming on the podcast to talk about your science and your story and for doing it with such eloquance and such kinder.
Thanks very much, Thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.
That was my conversation with Professor Almwa Shields. Her book, Life on Other Planets is a fantastic read, not just for the science, but also for her fascinating story of an unusual path into academia. I hope you all find it inspiring. Thanks very much for listening. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. Or more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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