Brag-Fall2020

By Shannon Kotylak
BA ‘98
The search for
Once upon a time, there was a curious girl living in a city named for angels. She loved
dinosaurs and astronauts but her imagination was captured by the stars which were often
hidden in the bright lights of her hometown. A classic yet little known movie called The
Dark Crystal by Jim Henson furthered her fascination with the story of three suns lining up. She
was full of questions that were beyond her parents’ knowledge so she turned to books to fulfill her
curiosity.
While many of her peers grew out of the looking-at-the-stars phase, she delved into the likes
of Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and more to feed her need for knowledge – even
though they were fiction. She took that thirst as she headed to Caltech as an undergraduate in
astronomy. The rest is history… or her-story.
Dr. Samantha Lawler (or Sam as she prefers to be called) is one of the
most interesting people I’ve ever met. Yes, she’s an astronomer, which
means she’s intensively studied physics as part of her specialty studying
the heavens but back here on Earth, her and her partner are raising their
two daughters on an acreage where they grow organic produce and
raise a mini-zoo of animals.
Even her area of research sounds like an episode of Star Trek: The
search for Planet 9. Asked to explain it to someone with no knowledge
of astronomy beyond Star Trek and Star Wars, Dr. Lawler laughed and
started gently, “It’s a theoretical planet that is supposed to be five to ten
times the size of the Earth in a really distant orbit.” How far is really distant?
“Well, take the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Neptune is 30 times
further from the Sun than the Earth. Now,” said Dr. Lawler with a twinkle
in her eye, “imagine there’s a planet that is 500 times further from the Sun
but still in our solar system.” Enough to blow one’s mind. How would you
possibly find and prove the existence of a planet that far away?
Fall 2020 Page 30
Students in Astronomy in Fall 2019 used the
Campion Student Commons to recreate the
relative distances and orbits of the planets in
our solar system (the pole is the sun).