Until last fall Amber Young was a NASA astrobiologist seeking signs of life on the more than 6,000 planets discovered beyond our solar system. She is fascinated by exoplanetary atmospheres and the signatures in them that offer clues that organisms might exist somewhere on those worlds. “Life changes the atmosphere,” she says. Now in her new role as a NASA project scientist, she calls shifts in atmospheric composition “the loudest way” life makes its presence known.
Even though she’s not actively searching for life these days, she still conducts research on the side. She is leading a volunteer effort to cross-compare exoplanet-modeling tools that astrophysicists use for exoplanet characterization. “I am really invested in the search for life elsewhere,” she says. “It’s not just what I do; it’s who I am.” To that end, she has crunched numbers for the early planning stages of NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, a flagship space telescope the agency hopes to launch in a decade or so to bring rocky worlds orbiting sunlike stars into our investigative reach. She still feels like part of the mission to get HWO into space.
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Jeffery DelViscio
From the excitement of an astronomy section in sixth-grade science to an early research project on methane in the Martian atmosphere, this first-generation college graduate’s interests have pushed into deeper space while remaining grounded in what Earth can teach us. Life could mean a lot of things, Young says. Considering the entire history of what has existed on Earth is critical to making sure we don’t miss some small clue on another planet as a signal that we are not alone. Earth has “presented multiple flavors of life as we know it,” she says. And Young is eager to see which flavors are universal.
This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.