Aragon senior has her head in the stars

Though Hao may be only 17 years old, she was able to participate in this valuable scientific research alongside Jian Ge from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kevin Willis from the Science Talent Training Center at the University of Florida and fellow teen Justin Hou from Henry M. Gunn High School. Hao’s team gave their presentation, “Zodiacal dust emission found in three potentially habitable planet worlds from the Kepler mission,” on Thursday, Jan. 13. The conference was originally scheduled to be in-person in Utah, but was canceled due to COVID-19 and held virtually instead.

The STTC is an online research training program where high school students learn how to conduct scientific research in a variety of different fields. Hao’s involvement with the STTC began more than two years ago, in the fall of her sophomore year of high school. From the beginning, she was focused on astronomy. 

Hao started out with an individual project focused on proving the habitability of planet candidates, and when the opportunity to work with a team on a similar topic arose, she jumped at it.

Hao described the beginning of her work as “rudimentary,” as she was still relatively inexperienced. But after help from her mentors, she found most of her work involved reading scientific papers and gathering data from astronomical databases. From there, she would write and run computer programs to filter out and analyze images.

Once a week, the team of four would hold project meetings via Zoom to discuss the work they developed since the last time they talked. Together, they were able to discover zodiacal dust thermal emission from three possibly habitable worlds, Kepler-69c, Kepler-1229b and Kepler-395c. While zodiacal light and debris disk research has been conducted before, this team was the first to hone in on habitable planet systems.

With this discovery, they were able to conclude that both Kepler-1229 and Kepler-395 are significantly younger than the sun and dust that have temperatures around 400 degrees Kelvin could be close to their host stars.

The findings of Hao, Ge, Willis and Hou concluded that there could be active formation of small objects such as moons and minor planets, which foster further research regarding smaller objects’ impact on exoplanets.

As a senior in high school, Hao is looking toward college next year, where she hopes to bring her valuable astronomical research experience. 

“I know that I do want to go into some science or STEM-related field, but then I also want to bring in some humanities … I [want] a perfect fit of studying science, technology and society so that I can bring the best of both worlds,” Hao said.

Samantha Johnstone is a senior at Burlingame High School. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.