Episode 136: Who Wants to Live on an Eyeball Earth? With Aomawa Shields

An image of an “eyeball Earth” with a thick layer of ice covering most of the world apart from a tiny patch of liquid ocean facing the star. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

We've learned so much about the planets outside our solar system in the past ten years, and we're poised to learn even more. What kind of life could live on eyeball Earths, and other types of tidally locked worlds? To find out, we asked Aomawa Shields, astrophysicist and author of the science memoir Life on Other Planets. Plus Aomawa talked to us about why burnout is such a huge problem for Black women in STEM.

Notes, Citations, & Etc.

Aomawa Shields’ website, plus her faculty page at UC Irvine.

Aomawa’s organization is called Rising Stargirls

Aomawa’s book is Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe.

She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Technology, Science & Other Nerdy Stuff is still available and includes Aomawa’s essay from nearly twenty years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched in 2021 and is already making incredible discoveries

M-Dwarf stars, aka red dwarfs, make up roughly 70 percent of the stars in our galaxy and are our best hope for finding a habitable world

Here’s a paper that Aomawa Shields recently co-authored about the habitability of planets orbiting M-Dwarf stars

Here’s another important paper that Shields co-authored several years ago

Here’s a talk that Shields gave recently about whether Earth will stay habitable, and whether other planets could be as well

Different wavelengths of light could bounce off the ice on exoplanets in different ways, as Shields explains in this paper