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Reaching for the stars From the cobblestones in Front Square to opening doors to space working with NASA, Luke Sheehan caught up with Caoimhe Rooney, BA Mathematics (2015), to discover more about her extraordinary journey and her thoughts on the question of life Dr Caoimhe Rooney has had a rare career, even for a Young Scientists contest this year, but notes that talent is mathematician with a powerful academic start and a still being lost overseas. As co-founder of Mathematigals, skillset that could have taken her in many directions: into an outreach initiative to encourage more girls to pursue pure maths or applied, towards astrophysics or heavy careers in STEM, she invests time herself into industry. Her doctoral work at Oxford focused promoting preparedness and confidence, on the reactions inside metallurgical ‘We aim to make maths accessible, furnaces. Now, just a few years later, she is showcase its many applications, and helping NASA analyse data in the search for extra-terrestrial life at the Ames Nobody was telling increase the representation of female mathematicians.’ How did a gifted Research Centre in California. me that I could work student from Belfast go on to use her Forbes, in listing her as one of its in mathematics or exoplanet space talent to approach the life question? Some of the answer reveals a numerical 2022 European ‘30 Under 30: Science & Healthcare’ luminaries, noted the modelling imagination that can make maximum uniqueness of her role as the “sole results from limited means. Describing her mathematician within a group of astrophysicists” work, making models for complex systems, studying the atmospheres of exoplanets (any planet outside Rooney notes how modelling often goes back to our solar system). The scope of the work is broad, with labour with a pen and paper, before coding and running expanding sets of high-priority data to work with, especially supercomputers comes into play. following the 2021 launch of NASA’s $10 billion, sun-orbiting Leaving school with A Levels, her first choice was Maths in James Webb Space Telescope. Yet a central goal of Rooney’s Trinity. She had to do all the application herself since the work with the Ames Center for Exoplanet Studies is to UK UCAS system was promoted more in the North. Why identify atmospheric signs that are correlated to life. Trinity? She had been to Dublin as a child with her parents Growing up in Belfast, she was interested in both mathematics and space but had no idea how that might translate into a career. She feels that Ireland could do more to reinforce knowledge about opportunities for young and had fond memories of the city. ‘I knew Trinity was an excellent university and had a very high reputation for maths, so when I was applying to university I visited again and fell in love with it!’ scientists. ‘Nobody was telling me that I could work in She enjoyed the environment and the four years of study. mathematics or exoplanet modelling. I think that needs to ‘The pressure to succeed academically came from myself start earlier so kids know what they’re looking for and that rather than my surroundings, which were friendly and it’s on their doorstep.’ warm. I enjoyed playing basketball.’ She went straight from She thinks there is huge talent in Ireland and mentions Dublin students, Aditya Kumar and Aditya Joshi, who won the EU Trinity to Oxford for her PhD. A doctorate in ‘Industrially Focused Mathematical Modelling’ may not seem like an obvious pathway to NASA but on its completion she applied
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to the agency’s Postdoctoral Program Fellowship and was then kept on as a research scientist. So how did this gifted student from Belfast go on from studying industrial processes to approaching the Great ET question? In both areas of research, it’s about maximising results from limited means. With the metallurgical furnaces she researched for her PhD, part of the skill was to make models that could project results for vast variables and quantities without detailed data. ‘[They] get so hot. You can’t stick a thermometer in there. They can’t take coal particles out because that’s going to affect the process. So there wasn’t really data.’ This turned out to be excellent preparation for her current work. With exoplanets, sparse data is an issue. About 5,000 such planets are ‘confirmed’, but consensus holds that most, if not almost all, stars have a planetary system – and there are approximately 200 sextillion stars (that we can count!) In the study of exoplanets, the light that meets the apertures of our ground-based and orbital telescopes yields most of what we have to go on. Pinpointing them is a tricky business: exoplanets can be inferred from the gravitational wiggles effected in the star by a planet’s orbit, by spotting them in transit across the star’s direct light, or by the light bounced off them by their stars. Different telescopes give complementary data; the Hubble telescope focuses on visible parts of the light spectrum, while the James Webb gathers infrared. For better insights, we can compare models based on data from each. The gaps between what we might like to know about a given world and what we can see are vast. Enter the computational models, which supply predictive simulations based on the data gathered by astrophysicists. ‘If you really wanted to try and properly model a planet that we know very little about, you would need to know so many things about the atmosphere, about the climate, about clouds, winds, about stuff that we just don’t have.’ Nothing compares to our knowledge of our own home. Therefore, ‘assumptions’ are necessary, as with modelling particles, interactions and energy releases from a furnace. ‘One of the things we want to approximate is the phase function, describing how the atmosphere is scattering the light. A lot of that would involve working with pen and paper trying to figure out the best approximation… then you can start to write the code.’ These steps require an extraordinary combination of calculating power and the creativity needed for leaps across the gaps where concrete data is absent. What does Dr Rooney think about the Big Question itself, the one she is helping to grind into an answerable form? The existence of simple life is a probable, but hesitant yes, because the universe is too big and ‘we’re not that special.’ Intelligent life? Unknown. In both cases, caution is needed. ‘We jump into the end of the story when we’re talking about life and intelligent life. We don’t know what most of the universe is even made of – when it comes to dark matter and dark energy, for instance. There’s so many more things that we would need to understand before we could make a reasonable guess.’ A system of reasonable (ever-more-refined) guesses is perhaps not a bad summary or Dr Rooney’s models, each iteration helping to bring us closer to resolving an enormous unknown – perhaps the biggest of them all.
