This “Many Worlds” post is written by Andrew Rushby, a postdoctoral fellow from the United Kingdom who recently began working with NASA’s NExSS initiative. The column will hopefully serve to both introduce this new NExSS colleague and to let him share his thoughts about the initiative and what lies ahead.
NExSS encourages a “systems science” approach to understanding exoplanets, and especially whether they might be habitable. Systems science is inherently interdisciplinary, and so fields such as earth science and planetary science (and many more) provide needed insights into how exoplanets might be explored. (NASA)
I’m most excited to join NExSS at its one year anniversary, and hope that I can help the network as it advances into, and works to fashion, the exoplanetary future.
Coming in from the outside, the progress I already see in terms of bringing researchers together to work on interdisciplinary exoplanet science is impressive. But more generally, I see this as a significant juncture in the fast-expanding study of these distant worlds, with NExSS and its members poised to facilitate a potentially revolution in how we look at planets in this solar system and beyond.
The ‘systems science’ approach to understanding exoplanets is, I believe, the right framework for advancing our understanding. Earth scientists and biogeochemists have been using systems science for some time now to build, test, and improve theories for how the Earth functions as an interconnected system of physical, chemical and biological components — all operating over eons in a complex and tangled evolutionary web that we are only now unraveling.
It is this method that allows us to better understand the respective roles of the atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and geosphere in influencing the past and present climate of this planet. It allows us to clearly see the damage we are causing to these systems through the release of industry and transport-created greenhouse gases, and offers opportunities for mitigation. We know the systems science approach works for the Earth, and the time to make it work for exoplanets is now.
But as Marc pointed out in his previous post about the first year of NExSS, the opportunity to leverage this method for comparative planetology is a relatively new one. We just haven’t had the data for building exoplanet systems models and making testable hypotheses.
Understanding a planetary system like this artist’s view of an ocean world, scientists have learned, takes an interdisciplinary approach.
