Zero Genie

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment of an occasional series, “Women of Taunton,” which explores the lives of women in history from around Greater Taunton.

Award-winning astrophysicist Emily Levesque, before turning her eyes to the skies and studying far-away stars, was born in Taunton in 1984.

An assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle since 2015, she attended Taunton High School before going on to earn her bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and her doctorate in astronomy at University of Hawaii in 2010. She currently lives with her husband in Seattle.

Levesque is renowned for her work on massive stars, and how they relate to the formation of galaxies. She’s observed the night sky on the world’s largest telescopes, and she’s even flown over the Antarctic stratosphere in an experimental aircraft as part of her research.

She’s also the author of the popular science book, “The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers.”

And in 2014, she discovered a new type of star.

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Levesque’s first experience with the wonders of astronomy came when she was just 2 years old, and Halley’s Comet appeared in the night sky.

“I’d been enraptured by space for as long as I could remember, but the original spark could be traced back to early 1986, when Halley’s Comet made its most recent close flyby of the earth,” Levesque writes in 2020’s “The Last Stargazers.”

Former Taunton Schools Superintendent and former Taunton City Councilor Dr. Gerald Croteau remembers Levesque as precocious, from the first time he met her, when she was just 3 years old. She and her mother were having a conversation outside of his office, and though he recognized her mother’s voice, he got up to see who else was speaking:

“The other voice was very young. But also, while the tone of the voice sounded young, the context of the discussion was very mature,” Croteau said in a phone interview with the Taunton Daily Gazette.

He recalled that Levesque’s love for learning stayed without her during her time at school, and beyond her graduation.

She began her interest in studying the night sky with her parents’ Celestron telescope, and has gone on to observe nights on the world’s largest telescopes.

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Observing stars all over the world

Levesque reminisces on her career, as well as what the lives of observing astronomers are really like, and what the future holds for observatories, in “The Last Stargazers.”

During her time at MIT, she was taught by James Elliot. He discovered Uranus’s rings, and was part of a team that observed global warming on Triton, one of Neptune’s moons. The crater Elliot on Pluto is named in his honor.

Levesque’s first working visit — as a summer student — to a professional observatory was at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, in May 2004, to study red supergiants in the Milky Way.

She’s also visited, observed, or performed other work at observatories all over the world, including: Mauna Kea in Hawaii; the Very Large Array in New Mexico (recognizable from the movie “Contact”); and Las Campanas in Chile.

Levesque has also worked with NASA’s Hubble Telescope.

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Once, she even took to the skies, to observe on a telescope that is actually a plane.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a modified Boeing 747-SP with a 2.7-meter telescope mounted in the back. SOFIA has mapped the magnetic field of the Milky Way, studied new stars being born, and searched for signs of water plumes erupting from Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Levesque flew as an astronomer with SOFIA out of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s base in Christchurch, New Zealand. She even got to sit in the cockpit for takeoff. They climbed to 43,000 feet, well into the stratosphere, so they were “stratonauts” that night.

That night, they even got to witness an aurora while flying.

Discovering a new type of star

When it comes to “the most exciting scientific discovery of her career,” Levesque writes that it “almost didn’t happen.”

In 2014, she was part of a team that discovered a completely new type of star, known as a Thorne-Zytkow object.

A Thorne-Zytkow object has a neutron star for a core. This would represent “a completely new model for how the insides of stars could work,” Levesque writes.

It began at Las Campanas in September 2011, when Levesque was there to observe some red supergiants. These stars were changing temperatures strangely fast for stars of their size, and got so cold that they reached temperatures “so cool that they flew in the face of everything we knew about the physics of stars.”

One of the stars was emitting rather than absorbing light, which was unusual.

But Levesque writes that it was still more of a “huh” than an “a-ha” moment.

A year later, that star turned out to be HV 2112: It had the same chemical profile that had once been predicted for a Thorne-Zytkow object, and it was the star that Levesque had observed the year before.

It had been a last-minute addition to the observation plan, but now, “An entirely new realm of science questions had been opened up, all thanks to the data we had captured on HV 2112.”

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How astronomy is changing

In 2020, Levesque also gave a TED Talk, at TEDxBerkeley called “A stellar history of modern astronomy,” in which she discussed “how the most massive stars in the universe evolve and die and how technology is changing the stories we tell about science and the cosmos.”

Mainly, how the technology of her profession has changed over the years, but how the spark of human curiosity is what drives it, and how that curiosity will continue to serve as the spark for exploring the cosmos in the future.

“The Last Stargazers” is also about the ways in which the study of astronomy and the roles of astronomers have changed over the years, and continue to change, from the technology used, even to who has historically struggled to be included in observations.

Women weren’t “allowed” to be lead observers at some of those observatories until the 1960s.

It remained such a rarity to have a majority of female observers on any given night that, in 1984, the year Levesque was born, it was a memorable occasion when Las Campanas Observatory and Mount Wilson both had nights where the only astronomers on the mountain were women.

Today, women are more represented in the field, but women of color less so. People of color, in general, still only make up a small percentage of the astronomy community, Levesque writes.

“A telescope can be a place of wonderful quiet, of walking comfortably alone through the dark and night and getting to soak up the beauty of the sky as a scientist and human. If, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, a room of one’s own is required in order for women to write and create beautiful stories, it’s thrilling to imagine what can happen on clear nights at telescopes with a mountain of one’s own.”

Though her work has been focused on the stars, Levesque hasn’t forgotten her Taunton roots.

Croteau, when he learned that his “shining star” had written a book, received a signed copy for his home library, where it resides in a special section:

“Emily’s book is there, with a note thanking me …. So that’s Emily in a nutshell,” Croteau said. 

Taunton Daily Gazette/Herald News copy editor and digital producer Kristina Fontes can be reached at kfontes@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News and Taunton Daily Gazette today.