Eight months to Mars

“I didn’t have a firm idea what I wanted to learn about, but I was keen on science,” he says. “Then I received a small telescope as a gift, which nurtured my passion for astronomy.”

It wasn’t until Nick was engaged in postgraduate research that he realised his knowledge of computing, mathematics and physics combined to create a powerful skill set for discovering alien worlds.

As a 2012 Royal Society Te Apārangi Rutherford Discovery Fellow, Nick is now based in the Department of Physics. He works as part of a team of University researchers fostering the New Zealand space industry, and is fully absorbed in detecting extra solar planets – where alien life might exist. 

“Everything in our galaxy is moving. Occasionally a star passes between us here on Earth and a background star,” he explains.

“When this happens, the light from the background star gets bent by the gravity of the star between us and it, in a manner very similar to light being bent by a magnifying glass. 

“By looking carefully at how the light from the background star appears to be affected by the gravity of the foreground object, we can detect any planets going around the foreground star.”

Nick doesn’t work alone. He’s part of a collegial, international network of scientists sharing information about their projects and supporting each other to solve research challenges.

“One challenge is developing a new methodology to speed up discovering faint planetary signals in the data we are going to get from a new space telescope that will launch in the mid-2020s.” 

If he’s not teaching or communicating with colleagues you’ll find Nick writing, adapting, running and debugging computer code that models the planetary systems he is analysing.

He’s currently working on machine learning computer algorithms to analyse planetary system data, which he hopes will ease the challenges in modelling data coming from our new space and ground telescopes.

“As we create experiments that generate ever larger and richer datasets, we will have to guide our computer codes to make discoveries without human intervention,” he says. 

“It’s the start of an era of computer-human co-discovery, as we expand our knowledge of the sort of extra-solar planetary systems that are out there.”

With plans to put people on Mars looming within the next decade, we asked Nick where he’d like to go should faster-than-light space travel become possible.

“I’d like to explore one of the Earth-like planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler 452b, perhaps,” he says. 

Not a bad ambition for a lad from the North Shore of Auckland with a talent for astrophysics.