Quick Take
Astrophysicist Melodie Kao had a rocky road to recognition. In 2016, while still a graduate student, she and her team discovered the first aurorae beyond our solar system, among other phenomena. No one believed her at first, but in today’s golden age of exoplanet research, the team’s finds have opened a new window into these faraway worlds. Kao has spent the past year at UC Santa Cruz as a postdoctoral fellow deepening her research, but now she is leaving for a new job. She talked to Lookout about the find, the ensuing controversy, and why science taught her how to love.
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Melodie Kao can casually explain exoplanet magnetospheres while simultaneously assembling a dozen cardboard boxes and taking stray bites of her sandwich.
Kao, an MIT- and Caltech-trained astrophysicist, has spent a decade surfing the cosmic radio dial. She specializes in deciphering the radio waves from outer space that get picked up by observatories like the Very Large Array, a huge cluster of dishes and antennae that dot the New Mexico desert.
Her work brings a new angle to the hottest topic in astronomy – exoplanets. With space telescopes like James Webb gathering new snapshots of these planets beyond our home star system every day, tuning in to exoplanet radio “stations” adds a key dimension to understanding how they formed and how they work.
Kao has been in Santa Cruz for the past year as a postdoctoral fellow, but is leaving this month for a job at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. She’s still a junior academic, but she’s already shaken up the exoplanet world more than once. While she was still working toward her doctorate at Caltech in 2016, she found an explanation for strange radio transmissions that had mystified her peers for a decade.
The radio waves came from brown dwarfs, gas giants bigger than Jupiter yet smaller than the sun, but no one could explain them. Kao realized the planetlike worlds experience aurorae, just like the Northern Lights that glimmer green across our own arctic skies. But brown dwarfs’ aurorae are invisible to human eyes. Instead, the electricity zipping above the brown dwarfs’ atmosphere was pinging out radio waves across the stars to Earth.
Her claim – made in collaboration with her advisor and another graduate student — challenged a decade of research pointing to stellar flares (solar flares, but on other stars) as the source of these radio waves. It ruffled feathers among established stellar scientists.
But Kao and her team were right.
They’ve since expanded on these discoveries, creating a new subfield in which astronomers tune in to the radio stations of faraway planets to learn about the magnetic fields that surround them, much like Earth’s.
Kao’s controversial but ultimately triumphant journey forced her to reckon with the shortcomings of science and its culture. She’s become one of its more contemplative and conscientious practitioners – she now uses science as a means to probe deeper into herself, her human relationships, and even the nature of love.
“Science helps me grow ever closer to my own humanity,” she says. “And it lets me learn all these different facets of love from science and then go and apply it with the people in my life.”
In her new job at Lowell, Kao will expand her repertoire, adding an optical telescope to study the visible light from these brown dwarfs. With this and observations she and her collaborators proposed for Webb, she hopes to color in the picture she’s sketched of brown dwarf aurorae and magnetic fields.
Lookout caught up with Kao in late April, as she packed her office into boxes for the long drive to Flagstaff. She occasionally paused to draw magnetic field lines on the whiteboard or use her hands to mimic electrons spiraling in a planet’s “radiation belt.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Lookout: Will you miss Santa Cruz?
Melodie Kao: When I first drove into Santa Cruz, I stepped out of my car in front of my new place, and the ocean hit my nose and the air was cool and moist. The first thought in my head was wow, this is home. I don’t want to leave. I seriously considered quitting science just to stay here. If I left science, I would come back. I’m going to miss it a lot.
It’s a real heartbreak of academia, how you have to move again and again, at least until you get tenure. Each time you make new friends, and then you have to leave again. It’s just heartbreak after heartbreak.
Lookout: In your time here, you’ve really solidified your accomplishments, making extrasolar aurorae and radiation belts a real subject in radio astronomy. How has this changed the field?
Kao: It’s really the exoplanet community that benefits the most from these discoveries. A central piece of the puzzle for characterizing exoplanet systems are magnetic fields. What shape are they? How strong are they? How do they change over time?
A gas giant’s magnetic field helps it form in the first place, then determines composition of its atmosphere and how it evolves over time. They even help planets settle into their orbits. Until we found these radio signals from their aurorae and radiation belts, we had no way of directly measuring this big missing ingredient of exoplanet-sized objects. Now we’re beginning to map it out.
Lookout: You were still in graduate school when you discovered these things. People had been looking at the radio signals for decades and thinking they were stellar flares. Was it strange to break so much new ground at such an early stage in your career?
Kao: At the time, the discovery was really controversial. I would stand up at these conferences and say, “I think we’re seeing aurorae,” and these experts in stellar flares would ask me questions that felt really pointed, almost as if to show the ridiculousness of what I was saying. Grad-student me didn’t know everything — I still don’t — so it was hard not to feel ridiculous in those rooms.
Then years later I attended a symposium for less than a day because I was busy writing my thesis. But this time, after presenting my results, some of those same people who had really criticized my work came up to me and apologized.
Lookout: What did it feel like to receive those apologies?
Kao: It was just such a relief that they finally believed me, you know? You go through grad school struggling to believe in yourself and your worth as a scientist. And then to also have your community not believe in your work just confirms all of your worst beliefs.
What kept me going was that I knew that the way I had analyzed this data was right. Even if I didn’t believe in myself as someone who could make it in science, I spent three years convincing myself of the data before I dared to publish it. So I knew I believed in the data and my work.
Lookout: Were you surprised they were able to be contrite like that after being so hostile?
Kao: I was surprised at the time, but now I realize they weren’t being intentionally hostile. I was challenging all this work they’d done that said the radio signals were coming from stellar flares and I think it scared them.
If some grad student in 20 years says all my work on radiation belts is wrong, it would shake my world. Hopefully I would be more prepared and skilled in how I’d respond, but I would feel defensive! It would be hard for me to let go of all this work I’d done. We give so much of our lives to help the universe tell its story, and it’s hard when we find out that we misunderstood it.
People say science is rational, but it’s one of the most emotional parts of my life. You get so invested in an idea, and then when the data works you’re so excited, and when it doesn’t you can feel real despair. That’s part of what made things really hard when I was younger, but now I’ve learned how to better navigate these feelings.
Lookout: That sounds like a huge emotional cost to choosing this career.
Kao: Yeah, I’m actually nervous about that. I think there’s this myth that some people just know they’re supposed to be a scientist, and I always expected to arrive at a place where I’d feel like this is the thing I’m supposed to do. But I’m learning that it’s a little like my aurora data – I have to keep convincing myself that it’s right for me.
I feel like the pursuit of science as a career is a study on the question of what is love and what does love really mean. In order to stay in science, I had to discover how I could grow and have a relationship with something that can’t love me back. It’s one of my favorite parts of science.
Lookout: So your love has to be kind of unconditional.
Kao: Unconditional has a bad connotation to it, but people have this concept of love being this thing that feels amazing every day. And I know people who wake up and cannot wait to start working on their data. But there are also seasons of love where you drag your butt through the horrible stinking mud up a 20,000-foot mountain under the beating sun, and it’s awful and painful and you wonder what you got yourself into. But you’re not doing it to feel good. Love does not always feel good. So you have to find ways to fall in love all over again, to get through those challenging moments.
At the end of the day, science helps me grow ever closer to my own humanity. And it lets me learn all these different facets of love from science and then go and apply it with the people in my life, instead of messing things up a lot more in my human relationships and learning that way. And similarly, the people I love teach me things that I can run back and apply to science.
Lookout: What else has science taught you that’s helped you in your life outside work?
Kao: It’s taught me to see and to really look. Because that’s what observers do, right? We look at the whole world. We look at the universe.
Sometimes in life there are things that can be very hard to look at fully and completely.
And when things aren’t going well and you’re really doubting yourself, science is this unflinching mirror that shines back at you. It cuts through the distortion field of your mind and points out the lies you tell yourself, like whether you’re good enough and whether you need help, or whether you’re as patient and kind as you’d like to think you are.
Lookout: Having that kind of relationship with your work sounds exhausting. Has it ever become too much? You hinted earlier at considering a different path.
Kao: Of course it has. But there was a thing that I wanted to give to the science community. I wanted to give them extrasolar radiation belts. That’s what I wanted to do. I would tell myself if I leave science after that, then I will have contributed something. Someone else will take it and build on it, but I will have given them something new.
Lookout: You’ve done that, though. You gave them extrasolar radiation belts – are you done?
Kao: No. I feel there’s more to do. And now that I have a new job where I won’t have to pick up and move for a while, I want to figure out what to do next. I can tell that I’m at an inflection point in my science that it’s time for me to evolve my science and let it grow so that I can grow.
Lookout: Any idea what that might be?
Kao: I want to experiment with building collaborations. I was in a scarcity mindset for a long time – I was scared all the time of getting beaten to the punch or not getting a job. I have a couple of people I love and feel very safe working with. But I want to go bigger. I want to build more of a community.
When I travel and give talks, I realize I’m no longer this scared grad student who doesn’t think she can make it. I have a tenure-track position now, and I have some big discoveries under my belt, and people want me to talk about myself all of a sudden. I feel like my voice matters in the community. So I want to take a more active role in building the community that I want.
Joseph Howlett is a Ph.D. particle physicist-turned-journalist who is currently attending the Science Communication program at UC Santa Cruz. When he’s not writing about science, he loves to look at birds and make weird stuff with friends. He wrote this piece as part of UCSC professor and Lookout Community Voices editor Jody K. Biehl’s class.