Astrophysicist Jake Clark, of USQ, has been granted a prestigious Fulbright Future Scholarship aiming to help answer one of the biggest mysteries of our universe: are we alone? In the last 30 years, whilst gazing up towards the stars, astronomers like Clark have come across some truly bizarre and spectacular worlds beyond our solar system.

“We’ve discovered planets that behave like comets in weird, oval like orbits, planets larger than Jupiter with years that last mere hours, worlds with one side so hot that molten lava oozes from the surface, while the other side is frozen solid. It’s absolutely crazy out there.” Clark has not set any specific expectations about the upcoming scholarship experience, wanting to make the most of it as it occurs. “I’m really going to come in with an open mind, to see what I can uncover.” His Fulbright project will use data collected by the Australian Anglo Telescope, USQ’s Mount Kent Observatory and information from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and could potentially revolutionise the future of exoplanet finding missions. “Instead of looking through huge all sky telescope surveys, we can find planets by analysing the composition of their host stars beforehand, potentially finding large rocky worlds known as super Earths,” Clark said.

As part of the scholarship, Clark will spend six months at the Southwest Research Institute’s headquarters in San Antonio, Texas next year, alongside world expert Dr Natalie Hinkel, a Planetary Astrophysics and Senior Research Scientist. Clark visited the Institute in 2019 and described the experience as feeling like a kid in a candy store. “This is the place where most instruments for NASA’s interplanetary missions get engineered and I was lucky enough to see that in action.” The existence of life on Earth is miraculous in itself, but the universe is unimaginably vast and our little blue-green ball may not be the only one of its kind out there. According to Jake, the challenge is determining what, exactly, makes a planet ‘Earth-like’.

“Accurately defining a world that truly resembles Earth is an immense scientific challenge. To really appreciate what makes Earth so special, we need to cross examine what it fundamentally means for a world to be habitable for carbon based life,” said Clark. This will take a hive mind of astronomers, astrophysicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists, and everyone else to help answer these questions. “After we answer the question of what makes the Earth so susceptible to life, then can we truly class other exoplanets as being ‘Earth like’.” The scientific study of astronomy is, at its heart, about humans’ innate curiosity and hunger to know more about the universe. For Clark, that curiosity started early. When he was seven, he used to set an alarm just to wave to Australian astronaut, Dr Andy Thomas, on the International Space Station as it passed by. The Fulbright scholarship is another step in a lifelong dream for him.

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