Few folks, if any, ponder stars—celestial or cinematic—the way in which Aomawa Shields does.
An astronomer and astrobiologist, Shields explores the potential habitability of planets past our photo voltaic system. However she can also be a classically educated actor—and that’s helped form her skilled trajectory in sudden methods.
As we speak, Shields is an affiliate professor within the Division of Physics and Astronomy on the College of California, Irvine, the place she oversees a analysis staff that makes use of laptop fashions to discover circumstances on exoplanets, or planets that revolve round stars apart from the solar. However whereas looking for life many light-years away is her day job, inventive endeavors spherical out her function on Earth.
In 2023 Shields revealed a memoir, Life on Different Planets: A Memoir of Discovering My Place within the Universe. She has began an influential instructional program that encourages younger women to discover house, given a massively widespread TED Speak about how we’ll discover life on different planets, and gained a string of prestigious educational awards, honors, and grants. She additionally performs the violin, cooks, practices yoga, and is a mother. And as what she calls a “relaxation chief”—knowledgeable proponent of slowing down—Shields has one way or the other managed the seemingly inconceivable: She makes time.
Her unorthodox path started on the display screen, within the realm of make-believe.
“I wished to turn into an astronaut. That dream began very early in my life, on the age of 12, after seeing a film that dramatized youngsters getting launched into house,” she says, referring to SpaceCamp, an ’80s youngsters’ comedy about an unintended house shuttle flight.
The subsequent little bit of cinematic inspiration cemented her curiosity.
“Charlotte Blackwood was an astrophysicist, and she or he was very glamorous, too,” Shields says, smiling at how she was captivated by the heroine in Prime Gun. “There’s an iconic scene the place she’s strolling down the aisle between Tom Cruise and different pilot trainees, and she or he simply type of whips off her glasses and simply appears like such a badass.”
A high-achieving scholar whereas rising up in California, Canada, and Massachusetts, Shields made her strategy to Phillips Exeter Academy, largely drawn by its state-of-the-art astronomical observatory. As soon as there, she obtained pulled into appearing in a severe means. “Enter a brand new dream,” she says.
All through highschool her astronomy and appearing aspirations “type of danced beside one another,” Shields remembers. “However I held agency to the primary one and went to MIT as a result of I understood that it’s one of the best science faculty within the nation. I discovered that on the age of 12—that’s the place I’m going to go.”
At MIT, Shields struggled academically at first and took refuge within the inventive arts. She was chosen to take part within the Burchard Students Program, whose month-to-month dinner seminars convey school members along with college students who excel within the arts, social sciences, and humanities. She sang within the a cappella group the Muses and carried out in numerous performs. On the finish of her senior 12 months, she discovered herself questioning: “Do I am going to grad faculty in appearing or astronomy?”
“There have been a whole lot of these items that appeared to be aligning—that have been telling me: Return and get that PhD.”
The latter gained out, however not for lengthy. Shields headed to a graduate program in astronomy on the College of Wisconsin–Madison. “Throughout that 12 months, I had a white male professor inform me to contemplate different profession choices, and that was laborious to listen to,” she says. She remembers considering, “I’m going to the opposite dream as a result of clearly somebody’s telling me that I don’t belong right here. Perhaps they’re proper.”
So she utilized to UCLA, the place she obtained an MFA in appearing, leaving astronomy for greater than a decade. However then, when Shields was working odd jobs to complement her appearing gigs, a mentor from her undergraduate years inspired her to look on a Caltech-operated job web site. She noticed a gap for a assist desk operator on the Spitzer House Telescope, an infrared telescope that’s notably adept at viewing the formation of younger stars—and it solely required a bachelor’s diploma. “I’d refer the more durable inquiries to the PhDs,” she says. “However by taking that job, I obtained to go to astronomy talks once more … This subject of exoplanets had simply exploded in the course of the time I’d been away.”
Shields had some success in appearing, together with an element in a movie referred to as 9 Lives, which screened on the Sundance Movie Pageant. However a giant break—after which heartbreak—got here after she was solid because the host of the present Wired Science, solely to lose the job when the producers determined to alter presenters. It was a “devastating second,” she says.
Quickly after, she emailed the astrophysicist and science communications luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom she’d been launched to over e mail by an astronomer working with the Spitzer House Telescope, and relayed what had occurred. He replied that he’d seen her within the pilot and instructed her that “with out a PhD you don’t have that avenue cred if you wish to do science tv,” she recollects. In the meantime, she had utilized to NASA’s astronaut candidate program however didn’t make it previous the primary stage. (She did, nonetheless, get to play an astronaut in a latest Toyota advert.) “There have been a whole lot of these items that appeared to be aligning—that have been telling me: Return and get that PhD,” she says. So she did, incomes her doctorate in astronomy and astrobiology in 2014 from the College of Washington.
Astrobiology, Shields explains, is a comparatively new subject that research the origin, evolution, and distribution of life within the universe: “It’s about how life obtained began on Earth.”
Astrobiologists would possibly deal with the habitability of planets, or on strategies for exploring life on different planets, or on liquids apart from water that might help life. It’s a extremely interdisciplinary subject. “There are astronomers which are in search of these planets and are utilizing their specific subject of experience to reply that query: Are we alone?” Shields explains. A few of them are “additionally chemists and biologists and oceanographers and geologists who sort out these questions from their very own lens and particular space of experience,” she says. “That’s why I find it irresistible. As an astrobiologist, we don’t need to get 15 PhDs. We get to collaborate with folks in several departments who lend their very own experience … on these science questions.”
Shields is making an attempt to reply a query sparked by the night time sky—one which’s deeply private but common in each the astronomical and the colloquial sense. “Ever since I used to be a little bit woman, I might lookup on the sky and surprise what was on the market,” she says. “It comes from a way of surprise for me. I nonetheless have that feeling after I lookup on the night time sky and I see these little pinpoints of sunshine. I’m wondering: Is there anybody trying again at me? … How far does house go?”
There are, she explains, 100 billion stars in our galaxy, most orbited by a minimum of one planet, and over 100 billion galaxies past ours. That’s about 1022 stars within the universe. The chance that solely Earth was in a position to produce life “I believe is fairly low,” Shields says.
“I’m in search of planetary environments that might be conducive to life past Earth,” she says. “And my staff does that largely utilizing local weather fashions. These are the identical sorts of fashions that may predict local weather and climate on Earth.”
Shields plugs info gathered by observational astronomers into such fashions, together with completely different potential combos of different, unknown variables—like the kind of gentle a planet receives from its host star, the composition of its environment and floor, and sure orbital info. “There’s solely a lot you can actually inform a few planet from the telescope info that you simply get,” she explains. “We are able to discover that parameter house with local weather fashions and say: Okay, if it has this floor composition, that is what the temperature could be like on this planet. If it has this atmospheric composition, any such orbit, that is what the local weather could be like, and that is how liveable it might be throughout its floor.”
Because the early Nineties, astronomers have found 6,000 exoplanets. Shields says these in Earth’s dimension vary—through which she’s most —quantity within the lots of. A smaller subset of these are orbiting in what’s referred to as the “liveable zone” of their star, creating heat sufficient circumstances to keep up water in liquid kind—the important thing to life. Up to now, as many as 100 or so planets that fall into that class have been recognized, however the James Webb House Telescope, launched in 2021, may discover much more doubtlessly liveable planets by detecting “biosignatures” suggesting a organic presence, comparable to specific gases of their atmospheres or glints that may be reflections of water on the planetary floor.
With the ability to detect extra of those types of indicators, Shields says, is the following “massive mission” in astronomy.
As we speak, in her educational work, her thoughts hurtles to the farthest reaches of the universe. However in her treasured hours outdoors of academia, she has discovered to be nonetheless. When her work schedule began to overwhelm her, Shields’s well being started to undergo. Then she found the apply of yoga nidra—an historical type of meditation through which practitioners are guided right into a deeply restful “yogic sleep.” Shields learn the guide Do Much less: A Revolutionary Strategy to Time and Power Administration for Formidable Girls, which claims that 20 or half-hour of yoga nidra “looks like three hours of sleep in your physique,” she says. “And because the mom of a younger baby, I used to be like: Okay, signal me up!”
Final 12 months she educated with Karen Brody, writer of Daring to Relaxation: Reclaim Your Energy with Yoga Nidra Relaxation Meditation, and have become a licensed facilitator. “It’s been vital to me to share it broadly and to actually attempt to do my half to introduce the tradition of academia, particularly, to this notion of resting as a each day apply,” she says. Now she’s at work on a guide about her try to average—to withstand the temptation to tackle an excessive amount of. She has discovered to say no invites and put agency boundaries between her work and private life.
Shields has realized that her seemingly disparate pursuits in astronomy and appearing don’t need to be mutually unique. Combining them makes her a more practical educator.
On a weekday in August, an ayurvedic soup simmers on her kitchen range. A music stand occupies the nook of a room the place she generally picks up her violin and performs fiddle tunes. (Her mother and father, each skilled musicians, derived her title from a chant of vowel sounds they made up.) She mentions the poem “swim | ladies of colour”by Nayyirah Waheed and recites it in a smooth, wealthy voice. A part of it goes: “This construction counts in your incapacity to say no. imply no. they take no from our first breath. return and return it to your mouth. your coronary heart. your gentle.”
“I must graciously let go or say no—make room for another person to say sure,” Shields says. “That permits me to have extra spaciousness in my schedule, as a result of one factor I’ve found is that ladies of colour, as we proceed up the tutorial ladder, the requests simply exponentially enhance, and so saying no is just not merely an vital ability—it’s a survival ability.”
Alongside the way in which, Shields has come to understand that her seemingly disparate pursuits in astronomy and appearing don’t need to be mutually unique. In actual fact, combining them—and sharing her ardour for each—makes her a more practical educator. Her coaching as an actor helps her craft lectures that preserve college students engaged and animates her displays, together with her TED Speak, in a means that resonates with nonscientists.
Shields can also be tapping into her love of appearing to encourage the following era of scientists who will assist reply astronomy’s massive questions. As a part of a postdoctoral fellowship by the Nationwide Science Basis, she was requested to design an academic outreach element. “I used to be like: Is there a state of affairs through which I may use appearing to show astronomy?” she says. “And I seemed it up. There was precedent for that. Astronomy schooling journals had proven that whenever you contain women in inventive arts—theater, writing—and also you incorporate that into astronomy schooling, you enhance women’ confidence in each asking and answering questions.”
The discovering resonated together with her personal expertise. In spite of everything, it was appearing—which she turned to when her professor discouraged her from finding out astronomy—that gave her the boldness to pursue astronomy once more. “I checked out appearing as this outlet, this protected house,” she says. “No one may inform me that I used to be unsuitable as an actor.”
With that in thoughts, Shields launched Rising Stargirls, which holds workshops utilizing the inventive arts to show astronomy to middle-school-aged women of all backgrounds. She and her colleagues have since revealed a research displaying that women who attended this system reported being extra excited to take science lessons and have been extra prone to imagine they might do effectively in science.
“We would like them to know that who they’re is inherently pivotal and significant to their research and apply of astronomy,” Shields says. “The sciences are extremely inventive, they usually get to convey that inventive creativeness and inventive inspiration they discover by the humanities into studying concerning the universe.”
That very same trade has performed out in Shields’s life, but it surely’s solely lately that she’s come to see similarities between her roles as an astronomer and an actor. “They’re each about story,” she says.
Actors need to convey the arc or evolution of a narrative by the lives of their characters. “Stars, planets—they’ve lives, too,” Shields says. “They’ve births, they’ve evolution, they usually die. It’s my job as a scientist to unveil the story—to find the story of whether or not there’s life elsewhere.”
