As a kid growing up near downtown Los Angeles, Michael Nayak would look up though a haze of smog and city lights, and imagine a crowded universe of stars beyond.
“Every time you thought you could see a star, it would turn out to be a plane approaching LAX,” he joked.
Today, as a UC Santa Cruz grad student and active duty captain in the U.S. Air Force, Nayak is still pondering the unseen reaches of space. Only now he uses light waves and math to study the dynamics of a star system far beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes.
By studying a crowded neighborhood of space 1,300 light years away, Nayak hopes to glean insights into what makes our own corner of the universe unique.
His focus is the system around the star known as Kepler-32, whose dense concentration of planets makes it like a celestial equivalent of downtown Manhattan.
Relative to our own solar system, the Kepler-32 system is tiny: it fits within an area a tenth the size of Earth’s average distance from the sun. Five planets, each Earth-sized or larger, are crammed within that narrow space,
If Mars, Earth’s closest neighbor, were that near to us, we’d see it rise and set five times a day, Nayak said.
The Kepler-32 system is weird – at least by the norms of our own, more sparsely populated solar system: The gravitational force fields of the different planets overlap and pull on each other as they squeeze past each other on their way around the sun. Orbits are an erratic, messy tangle.
Using mathematical modeling, Nayak set out to determine if moons could exist amid all that chaos.
“Everything is so crowded and moving so fast, you would think moons would either be kicked out of the system or would smash into another body and be absorbed.”
What he found out surprised him. Moons, it turns out, do exist – they’re just not faithful to any particular planet. Instead they hop around, switching orbits around different planets.
“Imagine us being able to trade our moon for Titan or Europa every few hundred years,” Nayak said.
“That’s actually possible if you’re the third rock from the Kepler-32 sun.”
Turning the wrench on rocket ships
A science fiction fan with a wry sense of humor, Nayak is interested not only in the scientific exploration of space, but in making that research accessible to ordinary humans.
Last month, he represented Santa Cruz at the UC-wide Grad Slam contest, which gives grad students three minutes to present their work to a general audience.
Credit: Robert Durell
Nayak’s interest in planetary science has taken him across the country, into the Air Force and from the extremely hands-on to the highly theoretical. (He also skydives, flies small airplanes and is seeking a publisher for Missed Connections, a 72,000-word comedic novel.)
Nayak started his career as an engineer. With an undergraduate degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, he went to work at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where he worked as part of the engineering team repairing solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle.
It was high-pressure, hands-on engineering with little margin for error – the kind of work “where often you are turning the wrench yourself,” he said.
But he was also drawn to research focused on longer-term goals and bigger, more existential questions about the universe and our place within it.
“In the back of the engineers’ ears are these scientists whispering, ‘Here’s what you need to build.’” he said. “I decided I wanted to be one of those people.”
Nayak joined the Air Force, where he designed and managed satellite experiments at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. He was drawn to UC Santa Cruz, where he is getting a Ph.D. in Planetary Science, by the interdisciplinary nature of the program there.
Bringing far-out research down to earth
As an Air Force officer, Nayak quickly learned that he wouldn’t be able to get his research off the ground unless he could communicate it well to a lay audience.
“The people at the higher ranks are not necessarily engineers or scientists, but they have all the decision power,” he said.
“Their position is: 'Convince me that it’s necessary. Tell me why it’s important and make me believe that you have the skills to execute it.'”
Now, Nayak hopes the skills he has honed through experiences like Grad Slam will help him sell his work to the public – as well as to agencies like the Department of Defense, which funds his current research.
Kepler-32, with its cramped quarters and orbit-hopping moons, is actually more common than our own solar system – which makes it all them more important that planetary scientists like Nayak understand how they operate.
“When you’re basing your assumptions about solar systems from a sample size of one, you come to certain conclusions about how these systems are likely to operate,” Nayak said. “If we can understand the cramped systems, which are more common, it will give us new insights into why we are different.”
