When Howard Chen was a teen, he found Carl Sagan’s basic e-book Pale Blue Dot (Random Home, 1994), a rumination on humanity and its lonely, fragile planetary house.
“I cherished spending time on the library and, out of likelihood, I discovered this e-book that modified my perspective of our place within the universe,” says Chen.
Now 29, Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and spent his early years in Burnaby, British Columbia, earlier than transferring to the U.S. for highschool. He studied inventive writing throughout his first 12 months at Boston College, however switched to physics the subsequent 12 months after taking an astronomy class. Within the new program, Chen bought to expertise the perfect of each worlds: being inventive and studying about science.
“I thrived in an surroundings the place I might ask large, daring inquiries to try to work out solutions utilizing the instruments and strategies of science,” he says.
Chen went on to finish his Ph.D. at Northwestern College, specializing in planetary science. He’s presently a postdoctoral program fellow at NASA Goddard House Flight Heart, the place he focuses his analysis on the atmospheres of exoplanets.
“I actually get pleasure from pushing our limits to grasp the atmospheres of smaller, rocky exoplanets which are inside the liveable zone,” he says. These worlds, the place liquid water might exist on the floor, are the apparent locations to hunt for indicators of life-friendly situations and even life itself.
Chen makes use of laptop simulations to foretell the evolution and composition of such exoplanetary atmospheres. His work focuses on incorporating chemical reactions that happen between a bunch star’s mild and a planet’s environment into local weather fashions, one thing that hasn’t historically been finished. These reactions play an vital function in figuring out which gases, and the way a lot of every, are current within the environment of an exoplanet. “Every fuel can provide us some clue of the local weather evolution and the present state of the planet,” says Chen.
He anticipates that this, in flip, will assist him reply large questions, resembling whether or not water could possibly be current on the floor of Earth-like planets, and if there are potential biosignatures that point out the presence of life.
“I’m hoping my work will enable us to have the ability to persistently predict the atmospheric composition of terrestrial exoplanets and to check this to what we’d be capable to ultimately observe utilizing telescopes,” says Chen.
Daniel Horton, a local weather scientist and Earth system modeler at Northwestern College who was Chen’s thesis advisor, says, “Howard’s drive, independence, and creativity counsel he shall be a pioneer within the planetary habitability analysis neighborhood for years to return.”
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