Researcher looks for origin of life
From Kalispell to Harvard and beyond, Sarah Rugheimer has taken her quest to probe the origins of life on the road.
Soon, she will take it to the United Kingdom to work with the top members of her field.
Rugheimer, who attended Flathead Valley Community in 2002 and 2003 before transferring to the University of Calgary to get a degree in physics, returned to her first school recently to present some of her findings and give hope to local students.
Her presentation was informative to the dozens of students in attendance, many of whom have designs to apply to prestigious programs on a track similar to Rugheimer’s.
She recently earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in astrophysics. She was chosen as a 2014 Harvard Horizons scholar for her studies on how to detect life in the atmosphere of another planet.
Rugheimer will head to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in the fall as a Simon Origins of Life Postdoctoral Fellow. In Scotland, she will continue her studies on how to detect life on exoplanets.
Her presentation back in Kalispell gave students, faculty and alumni a taste of what she has been working on for seven years.
“Hues of habitability characterizing pale blue dots around other stars” was the title of her presentation and was an homage to the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” to describe earth.
The enormous expanse of the universe is what Rugheimer tried to impress upon the gathered group. And that more than 30 earth-like exoplanets had already been discovered.
But what causes life? The factors being studied that make a life-supporting planet are numerous and include stable seasons, the planet radius, solid ground and makeup of the atmosphere.
“There’s probably aliens out there,” Rugheimer said. “But we’re never going to be 100 percent certain there is life on that planet, only that we think there might be.”
Part of her thesis is to measure the hues of these exoplanets, which can foretell what gases are in the atmosphere and whether they could support life as we know it.
“For the vast majority of earth’s history, the only life has been microbes,” Rugheimer said. “That’s what we are looking for. Single-celled organisms.”
With large NASA projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to replace the Hubble Telescope, scientists such as Rugheimer could actually get an idea of just how much life those exoplanets could support.
Questions such as how the size and luminosity of a star could affect life, how much ultraviolet radiation reaches the ground of these planets and how these planets look during different geological ages are the focus of her many years of study and will be the focus for many more.
While Rugheimer’s focus is more on a galactic and universal scale, back on planet earth, students at Flathead Valley Community College got a lesson that time at the Kalispell school can be a proper springboard to space.