She Followed Her Star
Moiya McTier '16, a dual concentrator in astrophysics and folklore and mythology, combined her interests by writing a science-fiction novel for her thesis.
Unfortunately for Moiya McTier, reality doesn't always imitate fiction. Sometimes in life — in McTier's life, anyway — the galaxy throws you a curve.
In March, the Harvard senior was finishing up a senior thesis for her unusual dual concentration: astrophysics and folklore and mythology. To bridge the chasm between the disciplines through her thesis, the Pennsylvania native decided to write a 60,000-word science fiction novel set on a planet she had studied in her astronomy research.
In July, she started writing, setting the novel in a rocky planet circling an M dwarf star 600 light-years away from Earth that had been detected by the Kepler Space Telescope. She handed in the first draft after a flurry of writing in February. In March, she checked to see whether more recent data could tell her anything new about the planet to incorporate into her next draft.
The star, she determined, is not the typical M dwarf, and its characteristics mean that the planet is likely bigger, orbits closer, and is four to five times hotter than Earth. It's also probably gassy instead of rocky. In short, it's a bad place for a story set on an Earthlike planet.
That sent McTier scurrying back to the drawing board. But instead of a wholesale rewrite, she fell back on the fact that most M dwarfs have three to five planets, so it's likely this star does too. She made one of those, a rocky one in the star's habitable zone, her novel's home.
"We picked this system because we thought [the planet] was habitable, an Earth-sized planet with liquid water," McTier said. "None of that was true."
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