Longmeadow native receives prestigious Marshall Scholarship

Date: 1/2/2015

LONGMEADOW – Adam Jermyn, an alumnus of Longmeadow High School’s (LHS) class of 2011, was recently awarded the 2015 Marshall Scholarship, which will allow him to continue his graduate level studies in astronomy for two years at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom (UK).

Each year, the Marshall Scholarship is awarded to 40 scholars across the United States for students to study for their graduate degree in any UK institution in any field of study, according to the organization’s website.

Jermyn, a 21-year-old senior at the California Institute of Technology, told Reminder Publications his main thesis at the University of Cambridge would focus on how planets are formed in binary star systems.

“If you’ve just got one star, the normal story for how planets form is that the star forms from a collapse from a cloud of gas and there’s stuff left over that orbits around the star and over millions of years this extra gas and dust slowly collapses into planets,” he added. “Because they’re going around the star in a circle, they’re already in stable orbits and there are no major problems associated with forming a planet.”

The one thing that is necessary for planets to form in any star system is the cooling of the gas clouds, which allows for the gas to collapse, Jermyn noted.

“There’s sort of an outstanding mystery at the moment about how Jupiter formed,” he added. “Our observations indicate that it formed more quickly than the rate at which it cooled seemed to indicated. Other than that, it’s a story that seems to allow [planets] to form without too much trouble.”

In a binary star system the formation process of planets becomes more complicated, Jermyn noted.

“That sort of cooling problem that I mentioned becomes much more difficult because you have twice as much light falling on your planet,” he added. “This can either mean that you have sort of a day that’s twice as bright or you have a day that’s twice as long or you might not have night at all. It becomes very difficult to sort of arrange the consensus such that your planet can cool down enough to form.”

Another issue in binary star systems is the orbit of the stars, which is elliptical and are no longer stable, Jermyn said.

“The chance that your planet either gets kicked into one of the stars or out of the system entirely and just goes out into the blackness of space goes up a lot,” he added.

Standard scientific models predict that binary star systems should be few and far between, Jermyn noted. However, astronomers recently have observed quite a few.

“There’s sort of a disconnect where our theories say that there shouldn’t be many of these and there are more than we think there should be “ he added. “So, that’s sort of what I’m going to be figuring out.”
 
Jermyn said he would be working as a theorist for his graduate studies for two years and would likely apply for third year of his scholarship to pursue his doctorate.

“My main tools are going to be pen and paper and simulation,” he added. “I can write a program on  the computer that simulates orbits. Given where the planet starts initially, you can figure or not whether it would eventually get kicked out.”

Analytic and compositional tools also help with questions such as what fraction of the time heat is coming in on one side of a planet or both sides, which helps Jermyn understand minute elements in his overall thesis, he explained.

Rob O’Connell, a mathematics teacher at LHS, said he worked with Jermyn after school when he was in elementary school and taught him topics such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and introductory calculus.

“Adam always impressed me with his passion for the mathematical sciences, and his eagerness to share newly acquired knowledge with other students,” he added. “He was respected by his fellow students at Longmeadow High School for his academic skills and his ability to clearly explain complex ideas from mathematics and science courses to his fellow students. In his free time, he was constantly reading math and science textbooks as well as the writings of famous scientists like Richard Feynman.”

Aaron Keller, a physics teacher at LHS who was taught Jermyn during his junior year, said he was entirely unsurprised to hear the Jermyn was awarded the Marshall Scholarship.

“With his intelligence and dedication, there are few accomplishments I imagine being outside Adam's reach,” he added.

One thing that Jermyn said he remembers about the majority of his teachers from LHS is that they would often stay late to help their students and were always available.

Jermyn said he continues to find inspiration in the age-old questions that science has been seeking to answer for centuries.

"My hope is that we keep looking up as it were,” he added. “The sort of interesting thing is that there’s two reasons that you might want to choose science that come to mind. One is that there’s a question that you want to know or that’s in you that you want to answer or that you enjoy the process of trying to find answers.

“From that perspective, I love the process and there are sort of specific questions like ‘What are the chances for life out there? What are the weird objects in the universe that we haven’t discovered or what we have discovered but don’t recognize yet for what they are?” he continued.

Science is in some ways similar to the arts, Jermyn noted. “You don’t really need a reason for doing it, it’s just sort of a thing that people appreciate for the sake of it and from that perspective it’s inspiring. You look up and you wonder. I find it exciting.”