Laura Flagg grew up near the nation’s capitol, and her parents used to take her to the Air and Space Museum all the time.
“It was free, and it’s a great way to distract kids,” she explains.
Later on, she has the “classic story” of an inspirational teacher, in this case, a ninth grade biology teacher, who took the students on “awesome” field-trips. On one such trip, they attended an astrobiology lecture. Laura thought: “wait, people study this for a living? That’s so cool. Maybe I can do that.”
So here she is, a PhD student at Rice’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, where she sifts through the clues and secrets the universe guards jealously, to “learn how planets form.”
It’s an enormous task, and Laura has an enormous target to help her: a planet far, far away in the galaxy, circling a star called CI Tau. The star is so distant – 500 light-years – that one cannot see it with the naked eye, only through a telescope – and even then, the star is only visible during the fall and winter. The planet that Laura wants to study around that star is even more elusive.
To gather information from across the galaxy, Laura makes use of building-sized telescopes. She can request data for free from NASA’s famed Hubble Space Telescope that was launched into space almost 30 years. Or, sometimes she gets the chance to visit the McDonald Observatory. It’s much closer than the Zodiacal flight of the Hubble Telescope; a mere nine-hour drive away from Rice (no public transit appears to link the two), set in the mountains of western Texas.
“It’s gorgeous,” Laura describes, remembering her last trip. The mountains are gentle, brown-colored humps rising over 6500 feet, covered with dried grass, rocks, scrubby little trees, and cacti. The various telescopes, locked inside of silver domes, are built high on the slopes. Because there’s very little humidity or light pollution, the night sky is spangled with stars.
When Laura’s at the Observatory, she stays in a dormitory just a few yards away from the telescope. All the work is done during the chill of night, when there’s no sunlight to wash out the signal from the stars. Laura hands off the specifications of the star and planet she studies to the telescope handler, who directs the computer that directs the telescope.
Laura doesn’t get an ordinary image back from the telescope. Instead, all she gets is a black backdrop across which are stretched white lines, that fade to gray, and that sometimes clump up into little white blots. From those rows of white lines, each of which represents a different wavelength of light, Laura has to parse out the signal of her star, CI Tau, and the planet orbiting it.
Laura’s star and its planet are both young – the star being a spry 2-3 million years. Laura likens her star to a young child – misbehaved and unpredictable.
“Normally, you detect a planet because it’s altering the signal of the star it orbits around. But with a young star, the signal is already crazy, so that makes it harder to pull out the planet signal.”
This is exactly why young planets are so hard to find. Steeling themselves against the difficulty, astronomers hunt meticulously after them. If the conditions and characteristics of these young planets, so fresh in their infancy, can be divined, they might illuminate the throes of conception through which those planets were formed.
The hardest of all to find are young, rocky planets. These are the planets that we at CLEVER Planets are particularly want to study – the ones where, like on Earth, we might find forces that could sustain life. But young rocky planets are usually small (think of Earth compared to Jupiter); and that makes them even harder to pick out from the angst-prone, young star signal. In fact, while a handful of older rocky planets have been identified outside of our solar system, not a single young one is known.
We do know of some young gas giants scattered throughout the Milky Way, though. In fact, the planet Laura studies around CI Tau is just such a gas giant, imaginatively christened as “CI Tau b.”
“That planet can’t sustain life,” Laura explains, then suddenly pauses and qualifies. “It almost certainly cannot have life – it’s extremely close to the star, and it’s a ball of gas, no one expects it to have life.
“But,” Laura continues, “hopefully in the future, we will be able to use the same techniques in studying ‘CI Tau b’ to study young rocky planets, if we can ever find them. And those are techniques that the CLEVER Planets team would be very interested in.”
Furthermore, massive gas planets, bringing the muscle of their giant gravitational pull to bear, have the ability to redirect bits of rock zooming around a star, and send that material to embryonic rocky planets that are newly forming. It’s possible, therefore, that learning more about a gas giant’s formation can clarify information on the formation of a rocky planet.
Laura cautions that much of this is speculation. How does she feel about studying something so far away, something that’s not firm, something you can’t touch or even see in real life?
“It’s interesting,” Laura says in a quiet voice, as she pauses to think. “In other disciplines, you might run an experiment. In our case, the Universe is running the experiment and we’re just collecting the data. That’s frustrating and cool at the same time. It makes it hard … but that’s exciting.”
~ by Mejs Hasan