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 “They’re looking for a shadow biosphere. They are looking for the origins of our solar system,” says Trent Alumnus Michael Gowanlock, describing how, for part of his research assistantship with NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, he went out on an astrobiology retreat. “They took a boat out into the ocean where they dug down deep to take core samples from the ocean floor.”

Michael Gowanlock completed his B.Sc. at Trent, majoring in Computer Science and Political Studies. He continued on as a graduate student and received his Master of Science in Applications of Modelling in the Natural and Social Sciences (AMINSS) at Trent in 2011.

Mr. Gowanlock’s recent paper, a result of his M.Sc. work at Trent, “A Model of Habitability Within the Milky Way Galaxy” is published in the international, peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology in the November 2011 edition.

Publishing his first paper marks his official entry as a contributor to a discipline. “I’m really excited to contribute to science,” says Mr. Gowanlock, “especially in a field as new and exciting as Astrobiology.” The article itself is only available to those who have a subscription.  However, a preprint version of the article is also available at: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1107.1286G)

Surf’s up for interdisciplinarity

Now working on his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Hawaii, Mr. Gowanlock is enjoying the culture in Hawaii. Fellow academics and professors go surfing in the morning, and though work is tough, life is laid back and super happy, surrounded by people who are excited about their research.

He spends half of his time working as a research assistant with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, on a project that entails measuring the degree of interdisciplinarity in astrobiology documents. The other half of his time is devoted to working on his Ph.D.

The project for his research assistantship came out of the challenge of overlapping disciplines and the integration of sets of terminology. Knowledge from many fields is often required to perform scientific research in Astrobiology. Integrating terminology into a common set is a massive undertaking, requiring a huge team of scientists. Mr. Gowanlock’s job is to apply machine learning techniques that will uncover trends in bibliometric data, to measure the degree of interdisciplinarity present in papers authored by scientists funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute. 

Is there life out there?

For his Ph.D., Mr. Gowanlock is continuing the work he completed for his M.Sc. at Trent in Applications of Modelling in the Natural and Social Sciences, where his thesis resulted in a model of habitability within the Milky Way Galaxy.

Is there life on Mars? “Not that we know of,” replies Michael Gowanlock, “but we’re looking.” “We have reason to believe basic life is widespread,” he continues, “but complex life (like a plant involved in the process of photosynthesis, for example) may not be common at all.”

If you wondered where the most habitable places in the universe might be, using Earth as a model, you would look for conditions similar in temperature that would allow for liquid water on a planet’s surface, conditions that would be conducive to the possibility of life. To begin with, you have to have a star that hosts planets.

As metallicity increases over time due to the continual birth and death of stars in certain areas of the Galaxy, chances of the development of planets increase.  Metallicity refers to the abundance of elements heavier than Hydrogen or Helium, in other words, the stuff that planets are made of.

Building on past research towards future understanding in an exciting new field

For his M.Sc., Mr. Gowanlock modelled the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy, illustrating that the edge of the central bulge holds the highest probability of life, raising questions regarding the dangerous effects of supernovae events and the gravitational effects of nearby stars within the bulge.

For his Ph.D., Mr. Gowanlock will be looking at the bulge of the Galaxy, a challenge in its asymmetry. In order to implement calculations modelling billions of stars, a large number of computational resources are required; so much of the research focus is spent on high performance computing. Part of the research also keeps Mr. Gowanlock connected to Trent, where he continues to work with Dr. David Patton, in determining the underlying characteristics and model assumptions concerning the Galactic bulge.