Dr. Jackie Faherty is a senior scientist and senior education manager in the Department of Astrophysics and the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. She’s published over 80 peer-reviewed papers on exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – with a particular focus on brown dwarfs. I spoke with Jackie ahead of her upcoming Halloween-themed talk this Tuesday night at AMNH about her interest in brown dwarfs, her mentorship of young students, and the scariest things happenings in space…
Your research focuses on brown dwarfs. Why did you choose to study brown dwarfs and do you consider them “failed stars”?
Brown dwarfs are these exotic and important astronomical objects that really link stellar and planetary astrophysics. They don’t have enough mass to get their cores hot enough or nuclear fusion so they just cool throughout their lives. Because of that, some like to refer to brown dwarfs as “failed stars” but I don’t like to use the word failure in the title of anything. Especially since that makes it seem like being a star is the achievement. Instead I prefer to call them over-excited planets.
There’s still a lot of debate on how brown dwarfs can even be distinguished from giant gas planets. What’s the latest consensus on this and what’s your personal position?
This remains very controversial! The lowest mass brown dwarfs are extremely similar to Jupiter and if found orbiting stars they would be called gas giant planets. The latest consensus is that the defining parameter between giant planets and brown dwarfs should come down to their formation mechanism. Brown dwarfs should form like stars by fragmenting off from giant molecular clouds and planets should form in a disk accreting material from their host stars.
In April 2018, the Gaia space telescope released the richest star catalogue to date, with over 1.3 billion stellar distances, helping astronomers map the Milky Way. What did you think was the coolest discovery that came from the Gaia revelation?
That’s such a hard question for me to answer! Gaia is a revolutionary telescope and has produced humanity’s greatest map of the Milky Way and beyond. To me, the coolest discoveries have been in understanding the structure of stars near the Sun. We can now map out the closest star forming regions in three dimensions. We can see very clearly what stars are moving with what other stars. I often visualize this data in the Hayden planetarium and it’s truly a sight to behold.
You mentor students as well. What is the biggest piece of advice you give students interested in pursuing a degree or a career in STEM?
My most important piece of advice to any student interested in STEM (although this is applicable to any field) is that they should fail early and often. Failure is an important aspect of what we do and it is guaranteed to be an almost daily aspect of your career so it’s better to see it early and learn how to cope and move on.
Your upcoming Halloween-themed talk at the AMNH is all about the scariest space phenomena. Can you give an example of something spooky and mysterious that’s going on in space that doesn’t get enough attention?
I think the spookiest thing about space is stellar flybys. From the human perspective, the stars are static and do nothing. However, if you look at how things move over millions of years, you begin to see that the stars are in motion – sometimes rapid motion – and they fly by each other at intriguing rates. Our solar system has had interactions with other Suns (and brown dwarfs) in the past and more are coming in our future. Such interactions might lead to cross pollination of solar systems or disruptions of loosely bound objects like our Oort cloud or Kuiper belt. In just over a million years, the star Gl710 has a very high percent chance of passing within our Oort cloud. It might be carrying with it its own solar system, therefore the interaction might be extremely intriguing.
Meet Dr. Jackie Faherty on Tuesday, October 29th, at 7pm at the Hayden Planetarium at AMNH for the Halloween-themed Spooky Space event. Details here.