LETTER #3: Finding Patterns In Unexpected Places

A Conversation With Maria Camarca PhD

I ran into Maria last week at Caltech’s Astronomy on Tap, a monthly event where the Caltech astronomy department has fifteen minute astronomy presentations at the Dog Haus Biergarten in Pasadena. Maria followed up a presentation by Zach Weinersmith. Zach walked us through a chapter of his new book, Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, And Have We Really Thought This Through. He did a disturbingly thorough analysis on whether cannibalism would be necessary and possible during deep space missions. Once he discussed the amount of salt needed to preserve an astronaut, I could no longer eat the friend chicken sandwich I ordered. 

After a short break, a colorfully dressed Astrophysicist took the stage with a slide showing different images of salads. Maria, an Astrophysics PhD student studying Jupiter’s moons at Cal Tech’s de Kleer Research group introduced her work with various images of salads and their different levels of crunch. She began, “We often think of space as this homogenous place. Many people think of it as this cold and hard place. When in reality, there are so many different textures in space.” When I was a kid, that’s exactly how I thought of salads - cold, kinda hard, gross. Nothing like how I think of them now as an adult who craves all the different textures of salads. What Maria was trying to do was dispel this myth that space is just this lifeless, solid and cold place. Because her research showed a very different reality.

Maria spends her time constructing the history of Jupiter’s moon Callisto from its surface. When thinking about the moon’s of other planets, it may be easy to assume that they’re much like our moon - rocky with craters. Jupiter, however, has more than 80 odd interesting moons in our solar system. The four largest in order are: Io - a moon covered in volcanoes. Europa, a moon covered in ice and speculated to have life teeming under its frozen surface. Ganymede, a moon larger than Mercury. And Callisto, the darkest and second largest moon orbiting Jupiter. The surface of each of these moons tell a very different story of how they came to be.

“We often think of space as this homogenous place. Many people think of it as this cold and hard place. When in reality, there are so many different textures in space.” - Maria Camarca PhD

Maria tells me, “There are a few different ways to get your hands on Callisto’s surface.” Using the ALMA space telescope, she is able to look at the fingerprints encoded in the moon’s geography. By creating temperature maps she is able to tell how dense the soil on and below Callisto’s surface are, giving her clues into how the moon was formed. The history of Jupiter’s moons tells us quite a bit about the history of the planet, and the early solar system. The same pattern can be seen in the planets of our solar system. Just like there are rocky moons closest to Jupiter and icy moons farther away, there are rocky planets closer to the Sun and icy planets farther away. This pattern uncovers a fundamental truth about solar system and moon formation.

For Maria, studying these patterns happened almost by chance. I asked her how she became an astrophysicist, and she told me about an inflection point in her career. She studied biology in undergrad, but was terrible with injuries. Which makes it quite difficult to become a doctor. She wasn’t sure what to do after graduation. But serendipitously in her senior seminar, someone dropped a topic called astrobiology and she picked it up. “I was floored learning that there was water outside of the solar system, and amino acids in comets.” With her new found interest a friend of a friend gave her a tour of the Goddard research laboratory. She eventually succeeded in admission to Caltech’s Planetary Science PhD program.

While at CalTech she has approached her research in a way that was uniquely her own. She tells me excitedly, “I don’t know if you caught it, but I wanted to come to that talk as colorful as possible. From the corduroy pants to the pink cardigan.” Using fashion as a medium to convey her technical discoveries was something you don’t see often at astronomy talks. I was curious how other astronomers reacted to her flair, her Samin Nosrat references, and her artistic take on Jovian research. She responded, “Having this new introduction and starting with something that everyone is familiar with is really well received.” Her approach is refreshing to a field that so often can seem mysterious and stiflingly serious.

Personally, I remember entering the field as an undergraduate researcher, unsure if I fit in with the other black hole physicists at CalTech. I was curious about Maria’s experience at Caltech, and if it was anything like mine. She tells me that in the beginning she wasn’t sure of herself, “As a bio major seeing sine and cosine on the board, I thought how can I even do this.” But then she found her community, “What’s helped me feel at home are the friends I made in the program. We can laugh at the nerdy science stuff, but most of what we talk about are the things outside of that.” That sense of community is necessary for the collaboration that scientific study requires.

As I was hearing her talk, I was sitting with my friend Daniel Mukasa. Daniel now studies Applied Physics Material Science at CalTech. We met 7 years ago at CalTech while I was studying black holes at our summer internship. I called Daniel on my way to Caltech, he answered my new number, heard my voice, and met me 15 minutes later at the talk. Our relationship since leaving CalTech has been just that - you call, I’m there.

Often when talking about imposter syndrome, that familiar sense of doubt that plagues the best of us, the solution we turn to is representation. Often I hear that we have to see someone who looks like us in the role we want to know it’s possible. But from Maria’s experience, another simpler pattern emerges - encouragement. What strengthens our ability to venture into the unknown, to pivot into a new topic, or to push the boundaries of what we think we can do is someone else believing in us and telling us that we can. That sense of encouragement and collaboration is something that she embodies and shares. It is my hope that all new researchers get to experience that.

Yours Truly,

Mad Black Scientist