Adam Solomon
Adam Solomon

His Finalist Year: 2006

His Finalist Project: Finding ways to measure the mass and age of brown dwarfs

What led to the project: From ages three to five, Long Island, N.Y., native Adam Solomon thought dinosaurs were pretty cool. Then at age five he read a book on the planets and his loyalties shifted completely. Studying heavenly bodies "is what I wanted to do," he says. "There was no other choice."

So when he joined Bellmore, N.Y.'s John F. Kennedy High School's three-year research program in his sophomore year in 2003, he immediately told his teacher, Barbi Frank, that he would be doing an astrophysics project. She saw two problems with this idea: First, Solomon had never studied physics or calculus, and second, none of her students had done a project in that area before. The school had no network of mentors.

Solomon tried to solve the second problem first. He spoke to famed Yale University astrophysicist Meg Urry, but then she discovered that he didn't know Newton's law of gravity, "which would make studying black holes hard." So, backtracking to solve the first problem, Solomon took physics at a community college in order to learn its fundamentals. Then, he started walking around the Columbia University astrophysics department knocking on doors, looking for mentors. "They all turned me down," he says.

One person finally agreed to forward his curriculum vitae (CV) to a postdoc who was then working at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Solomon was 15, so he didn't have much to put on a CV, never mind even having one. He went home and Googled "CV," pulled something together, and eventually started working with astrophysicist Kelle Cruz (now a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology) on a project involving brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are basically failed stars. In normal stars, the swirling balls of gas present during the star's formation become so big that they press in on themselves, forming a central core that is dense enough to cause hydrogen atoms to fuse. This nuclear fusion is what causes stars to produce heat and light. Because brown dwarfs are smaller, lacking sufficient mass to start a fusion reaction, they radiate only very little light. That makes them hard to find, so they haven't been studied much until recently.

Solomon studied hundreds of brown dwarfs Cruz had identified. The project was remarkably charmed: By looking at the light that was given off, the two of them found new ways to estimate the mass and age of brown dwarfs. They published their results in The Astronomical Journal and other places.