Testing Touchdesign

I take my driving test tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope”

A History of Black Futures

This week I gave an invited talk at NASA Goddard and took a day to visit the Afrofuturism exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I picked up the book inspired by this exhibit a year ago during an NYC trip and have been itching to go since.

This specific display in the photo made me tear up. From left to right it shows the flight suit of Trayvon Martin, the flight suit of Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek, and the flight suit of astronaut and former administrator of NASA Charles Bolden. Three scenarios: A future taken away, a future imagined, and a future that has been realized. When Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, he also took away his ability to be creative, curious, and explore the world around him.

I really enjoyed doing this interview for the Brown Dwarf Podcast. It was such a pleasure talking with Phoenix.

Top: Cathedral of St. Augustine

Bottom: Piece from Juan Obando and Yoshua Okón: DEMO

The People Behind JWST

I was featured in an article about the people who support and use JWST. I was so excited to share more of my personal experience working with the data. Link to article here.

Another video that highlights some of my work and hopes for JWST are here in this TikTok posted by the SETI Institute. The interview was done by Franck Marchis.

A Rogue World, not a Failed Star

At the scientific conference Cool Stars 22 hosted on the UC San Diego campus, there were numerous talks about stellar and substellar research. The last session on Friday was titled Brown Dwarfs and Giant Exoplanets: Future Prospects and Thirty Years of Discovery. The first talk was an invited review by Davy Kirkpatrick, a prolific brown dwarf researcher that has enabled my own research and the work of others. It was an overview starting from the discovery era into the characterization era we are in right now thanks to JWST.

I appreciated him openly saying that brown dwarf researchers need to stop letting people refer to brown dwarfs as "failed stars" and be careful when talking to media. This is crucial because brown dwarfs are not a typical astrophysical object people are exposed to. Many people know what galaxies, planets, and asteroids are and these objects have been repeatedly depicted in science fiction for decades. Many people may not have an image in their mind when they read the phrase "brown dwarf".

A brown dwarf is a Jupiter-sized (sized in radius, not mass) object that is mainly hydrogen and helium gas. Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen for energy like stars, but some of the most massive brown dwarfs can still fuse deuterium. They start out with whatever heat they were born with and cool down slowly over time. Brown dwarfs range in temperature from about 4400 to 35° C ( 2700 to 280 Kelvin). This temperature range extends from the bottom tail of the coolest stars to average room temperature. Such a massive spread in temperature leads to a large variety in the types of gases and clouds we see within their atmospheres.

Brown dwarfs are unique and dynamic worlds that exist outside of the context of not being able to fuse hydrogen like stars. Astronomers commonly see water vapor, methane, carbon monoxide, ammonia, or carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. Some warm brown dwarfs have clouds with sand-like material and the coldest ones could potentially host water clouds like the ones we see on Earth. Brown dwarfs even have weather. These objects are very successful at repeatedly challenging our understanding of how atmospheric chemistry works.

In my own head, I frequently imagine brown dwarfs as planet-like worlds. Essentially Jupiter with a different, but cooler color scheme. Maybe with less cloud coverage for the hottest brown dwarfs. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society among the cloud decks or even orbiting around a brown dwarf. If those beings had vision, they would very likely need to see in the infrared given the absence of a host star.

While doing my own work I would like to romanticize brown dwarfs a bit more and get back in touch with the wonder that led me to the field in the first place. One way I'm hoping to do that is by participating as an advisory board member for the in development planetarium show Rogue Objects. The planetarium show is being developed by Janani Balasubramanian who is an artist in residence with the Brown Dwarf New York City Research Group. I had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with them last year about what we thought brown dwarfs looked like and how they related to the everyday experiences of people.