DANCING WITH THE STARS
Watching Monday’s solar eclipse will be the latest highlight in the meteoric career of planet hunter Ray Jayawardhana.
The roadless Mongolian trek was mountainous and its canyonedge perils were amplified by the frequent swigs of vodka the driver was tossing back.
The 16-hour journey to a high desert plain would be rewarded for Ray Jayawardhana, however, with his second view of a total solar eclipse — and of a shaman leading a large crowd of yurt-dwellers in a clamorous effort to reverse it.
“The belief was that a monstrous deity called Rah was supposedly gobbling up the sun,” says Jayawardhana, York University’s dean of science, of that 2008 spectacle.
“People (were) howling, screaming, shouting, banging drums . . . to kind of make Rah spit the sun back out,” says Jayawardhana, who is also a cutting edge astronomer at the Toronto school.
Science is a joyful adventure for Jayawardhana — who will be travelling to the sweet-spot state of Idaho to view the eclipse on Monday.
And it’s an adventure he is keen to share with the public.
“He makes these complex topics perfectly understandable and intriguing and exciting,” says York’s president, Rhonda Lenton.
His accessible writing “gets people wanting to know more,” she says, leading people to see university and possibly a science focus as an option in their lives.
“It’s important (for me) to think of science as a very human endeavour.” RAY JAYAWARDHANA
This week’s total eclipse will track from east to west in a belt across the middle of the United States — with the attendant American media interest giving it one of the higher profiles of any astronomical event in years.
It will be Jayawardhana’s third total solar eclipse sighting. He travelled to a Turkish desert in 2006 for his first.
Jayawardhana — RayJay to his friends, befitting his breezy demeanour — is a sought-after commentator on television; he drops CNN host Wolf Blitzer’s name in passing. He has also written popular books on neutrino hunting, planet and star formation and the search for exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system.
And compared to these complex, theory-heavy astrophysical enigmas, eclipses are fairly routine geometry.
But Jayawardhana, 46, still views the happenstance alignments of Earth, moon and sun as a wonder and an enticement to the field of astronomy for youngsters.
“It is kind of a magical event,” he says. “You see the eclipse, but you also feel the chill in the air, you hear the birds singing . . . it’s really kind of an immersive experience.”
It was another recurring astronomical phenomenon — the 1985 appearance of Halley’s Comet over his native Sri Lanka — that helped lure Jayawardhana to the celestial sciences.
He’d been fascinated with space since he was a tot — from the night his father pointed to the moon over their home in the capital city of Colombo and told Jayawardhana that men had walked there.
“But then I saw this notice at the American Central Library in Colombo that had been put up by somebody trying to organize an amateur astronomy group,” he recalls.
“And it actually said Halley’s Comet will be seen” from Sri Lanka.
He attended the inaugural session with trepidation, as it was being conducted in English — a then shaky second language to his native Sinhalese.
After his first meeting, however, the14-year-old Jayawardhana was hooked on the planets and stars.
It didn’t hurt that the club was sponsored by famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who had emigrated from England to Sri Lanka in the 1950s and was also a relentless public advocate of astronomy and space travel.
“And because of being active in the group, I actually got to meet him when I was 14 or 15,” Jayawardhana says.
Clarke would become one of three key influences on Jayawardhana’s choice of career, and on the way he would come to conduct it.
The two others included Sri Lankan-born NASA scientist Cyril Ponnamperuma and Carl Sagan, the famed U.S. astronomer who had written and hosted the first rendition of the popular PBS series Cosmos in 1980.
The latter pair were top-drawer scientists in the own right. Like Clarke, however, they both saw the popularization of science as a key part of their calling.
Ponnamperuma “actually studied lunar (rock and soil) samples that the (Apollo) astronauts brought back, so he was very well known in Sri Lanka for that,” Jayawardhana says.
“But he was also really good at giving public talks. He appeared in NASA videos about meteorites and their chemistry, and he was publicly engaged becoming science adviser to the president of the country.” Jayawardhana would come to know Ponnamperuma well through his outreach work to budding Sri Lankan scientists, like those in the astronomy club.
And Sagan, a Cornell astrophysicist whose Cosmos show Jayawardhana watched during his astronomy club meetings — was the pre-eminent science communicator of his generation.
“I think there are many different ways of being a scientist, many different styles,” Jayawardhana says. “For me, that was the appealing one.”
In addition to his books, Jayawardhana is a frequent contributor to major papers and magazines around the globe and a go-to space expert for newscasts in Canada and the U.S.
“It’s important (for me) to think of science as a very human endeavour,” he says. “I do think it’s doing good in the world to share the understanding of science but also the process of doing science, the frustrations of doing science, the excitement of doing science with a broader audience.”
To that end, Jayawardhana’s writing and talks set out the connections of research and discovery to broader themes found in literature and mythology and delves into the personalities and biographies of the people engaged in the work. Yet Jayawardhana laughs at comparisons to Sagan, or his
Cosmos- sequel host and modern science gadfly Neil deGrasse Tyson — saying he has no ambitions to such celebrity status.
“I certainly enjoy the broader engagement, whether it’s writing an article for a kids magazine or an op-ed for the New York Times or speaking to a group of high school students,” he says. “But honestly I’m . . . doing it because I’m having fun doing it. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m doing it out of a mission.”
Jayawardhana’s main mission remains his cosmological research, which has brought him into the elite ranks of the planet hunters who now dominate the astronomical field.
“I wouldn’t like to say he’s in the top 10 exoplanetary researchers on the planet — but he must be getting darn close,” says York astronomer Paul Delaney.
“He has a very, very high stature in that area of astronomy.”
Delaney says Jayawardhana’s research output — about five papers a year — is prolific by any standard. And most are published in top journals, he says.
Jayawardhana’s career was launched at the dawn of that exoplanetary age — the first exoplanet being discovered in 1995. And a1998 study he led on possible planetary formation observed around a distant star brought him instant recognition in the field while still a graduate student at Harvard.
That paper — which observed a hole in the dusty disc surrounding the young star HR 4796A — was strong evidence that a forming planet lurked there. It made the cover of Newsweek magazine upon its release.
But his journey to planetary stardom had unlikely roots in a Sri Lankan family that was far from affluent and had no scientific connections.
What it did have was a father, Somapala Jayawardhana, whose bootstrap story still counts as the younger Jayawardhana’s biggest inspiration.
“He basically had to drop out of school at age 14, because his father died, and take a job,” he says. “But then somehow he managed to do night school and finish high school and do an external degree from the University of London.” The elder Jayawardhana became a teacher and then worked his way up through his homeland’s civil service to the most senior of levels.
His professional rise was accompanied by a voracious and lifelong appetite for learning.
“And he was also kind of at heart more of an academic, and he wrote all these books about history and language on the side,” Jayawardhana says. “Which was incredible because he was working pretty demanding jobs during the day.”
The elder Jayawardhana would go on to earn a doctoral degree in linguistic philosophy after retiring in his 50s.
That yearning to learn, his work ethic and academic aspirations were passed down to his only son, as was the desire to write.
“He was interested in intellectual things and his friends were writers and archeologists and professors,” says Jaywardhana, who also has a sister, Jayani. “It certainly rubbed off on me.” So did the habit of reading, and one set of books — children’s works on life in other countries — sparked his second biggest passion.
“I read about these really faraway places I had no other clue about,” he says. “Mongolia was one of them — I read about yurts at the age of 6 or 7.”
Jayawardhana credits the books for the travel bug that has taken him to more than 50 countries across all seven continents, for both scientific work and personal interest.
Both his father and mother, Sirima, would also instil in him a get-up-and-go spirit that he prides himself on and that played a key role in Jayawardhana’s unlikely acceptance into Yale University.
Despite top marks in high school, an Ivy League education was an improbable leap for a 19-year-old Sri Lankan. That’s where the stamp story comes in.
Four years earlier, as an avid astronomer in Grade10, in1987, he was well aware that the Apollo 11 moon landing’s 20th anniversary was approaching two years hence.
“So I wanted to see if there was any way to get the government to issue a stamp for the anniversary,” Jayawardhana says. “As a kid I did bit of stamp collecting . . . (and) I did know that stamp collectors abroad would love a stamp from an exotic country referring to events that the whole world knows about.”
Jayawardhana approached the director of Sri Lanka’s stamp bureau, who warned it would not fly with government officials coming from a 15-year old kid.
“And I said ‘well, you know, how about if I get a letter from Arthur Clarke and what if I get a letter from the president’s science adviser (Ponnamperuma)?’ ”
Both his astronomy club acquaintances came through. And when the moon stamp series was issued, it was unveiled at Jayawardhana’s high school.
“I was the one working behind the scenes and gathering all this support,” Jayawardhana says.
He thinks that kind of leadership and community involvement helped him stand out in his application to Yale.
From Yale, Jayawardhana entered graduate school at Harvard, where his dissertation on planetary formation would lead to the 1998 paper and future career.
After Harvard he spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan before a meeting at the University of Toronto led to a job offer.
He joined York in 2014 — following a decade at the U of T — when he was offered the dean of science position.
Since his seminal 1998 paper, some 3,500 planets have been discovered outside this solar system and the potential to detect Earth-like bodies — that may support life — is escalating quickly.
Using the world’s largest telescopes, Jayawardhana has helped pioneer techniques that tease out spectrographic light signatures from distant planets to detect atmospheric and surface conditions that might exist on them.
He also has helped lead the science team that designed the Canadian component of the James Webb Space Telescope — which is larger than its predecessor, the Hubble — to be launched by NASA next year.
“As a result of that, we have been given 400 hours of guaranteed time to use James Webb . . . and we’re using roughly half of that (time) on exoplanets,” he says.
“It really has been heady stuff,” says Jayawardhana, whose career has tracked almost precisely with the rise of the new field.
Still, the undoubted success at a young age has never gone to Jayawardhana’s head, says Lenton, York’s president.
“All great leaders have a component of humility along with their passion,” she says. “So I’m not surprised to see that humility in Ray.”
Jayawardhana is married to Dr. Kathryn Simms, a Toronto anesthetist. and the pair have two young children, born here.
“I like living in the city very much,” says the resident of the Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. area. But will he spend the rest of his career in Canada? The stargazer doesn’t know.
“It’s hard to predict the future.”