Dr. Vladimir Airapetian’s journey from Baku to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the U.S., where he now works as a senior astrophysicist, mirrors the path that many scientists in Armenia took after the country gained its independence in the early 1990s. 

Hetq sat down with Airapetian during his recent visit to Armenia, at the invitation of the Enterprise Incubator Foundation, to give a talk aimed at encouraging young people to pursue studies in the sciences.

Baku-born Airapetian says the education system in Soviet Azerbaijan was weak in the 1970s and he didn’t feel like he was learning anything. This reality convinced him to leave Baku University after two years of study and pursue his education in Armenia. Education standards in Soviet Armenia were vastly better.

In 1979, aged nineteen, Airapetian was admitted to Yerevan State University, where he graduated in 1982 with degrees in theoretical physics and astrophysics. He then pursued postgraduate studies at YSU in astrophysics and had the good fortune to have Viktor Ambartsumian, widely regarded as the founder of theoretical astrophysics in the Soviet Union, as one of his lecturers.

Leaving Armenia: The Turbulent 1990s

Airapetyan says many scientists, doctors and professors left Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

“The standard of living began to decline, and many left Armenia. Unfortunately, the situation changed, and financial issues arose. They were turbulent times,” he says.

Airapetian pulls no punches when pointing out the challenges faced by universities in Armenia today and gives the example of a conversation he had with Yerevan State University (YSU) Rector Hovhannes Hovhannisyan two years ago.

‘He asked me what I thought about the future of the university. I said the university starts with the board of trustees, which should be politically independent. We have a rich diaspora, powerful specialists in various fields, we can call for and create an independent board of trustees, which will have freedom and independence. But when I looked at the current composition of the board, unfortunately, it includes a deputy minister, state officials, and it has state control. Thus, science cannot develop, nor can the economy. We understood this back in Soviet Union of the 1970s,” Airapetian” says, stressing the need that institutions of higher learning must have specialists included in their administrations.

Collaborating with Victor Hambardzumyan at Byurakan

Airapetian, who obtained his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia, has over twenty-five years’ experience in theoretical astrophysics, heliophysics and astrobiology. 

He talked about his stint at the observatory (1982-1992) and working alongside Viktor Hambardzumyan.

This reporter asked Airapetian if he wasn’t anxious to be the first to “check” the findings of the world-renowned astrophysicist.  

“Hambardzumyan was a unique person in that he had his own notion of ​​how the universe works, how stars and galaxies are born and live. It’s clear that sun flares are at work. His theory was that these flares can arise from extremely hot material. But now we find out that it is not that, but a magnetic field - a current of several one hundred billion amperes can arise due to a magnetic field. At that time, I started to show the connections between the sun and the stars, and I am still engaged in this. For Byurakan, it was very new, because no one had dealt with plasma issues and how this mechanism could work in stars,” he tells Hetq.

Airapetian’s advice to budding scientists: “Never give up”

When asked what advice he would give budding young scientists in Armenia, the astrophysicist stresses the virtues of persistence and flexibility.

“My first piece of advice is not to give up. Secondly, learn English, because if a new theory or idea arises, you need to present it to everyone. After World War II, English became the international language of science. This means that you need to master English and explain your idea, not only explain it, but also explain it well.”

Airapetian is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Japan’s Kyoto University and says that at a recent forum there he advised young scientists never to heed their professors completely.

“If you have your own idea, a scientist should be a rebel, a revolutionary. You should not be afraid to prove a new idea, even if it means going against the professor. If you have that much energy and spirit, it is particularly good, because scientists are rebels. There is a culture in Japan that thinks that professors are god, they believe them, but I don’t want them to believe,” he says, adding that scientists are human and can be wrong.

“I remember when I met Hambardzumyan. I was 25-26 years old. I’d present my ideas, and he’d reply, ‘who said I was right?’ He was a great man, a real scientist. A true scientist thinks like that, while a bureaucrat says, I am always right.

Hubble Telescope searches for faint galaxies: Airapetian’s start at NASA

The astrophysicist says he started working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1995 as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team. 

He’s now a senior astrophysicist at the Center’s Heliophysics Science Division (HSD). It studies the nature of the Sun, and how it influences the very nature of space – and, in turn, the atmospheres of planets and the technology that exists there.

“The telescope began its mission in 1993, but many astronomers doubted its ability to observe extremely distant galaxies. In 1994, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, asked a naive question: could we detect faint galaxies if we observed a dark area of ​​the sky for a long time, without nearby stars or other objects?” Airapetyan recounts.

The astrophysicist explains how telescopes work by using the example of collecting rainwater in a bucket. “The bigger the bucket, the more water you can collect. The telescope is the same. It collects light, just as a bucket collects water. The larger the telescope's mirror and the longer we observe an object, the more light we can collect.”

“We can only collect starlight at night because the Sun's light is tens of millions of times brighter than starlight during the day. The longer you observe at night, the more light you will collect. By the same logic, Williams suggested that we can distinguish previously unknown galaxies because they are too faint,” Airapetian says. 

The astrophysicist then says there are one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, each with one hundred billion stars, and that a mere ten percent of them are like the Earth’s Sun.

He’s been fascinated with stars, their life cycles, ever since his start at NASA via the Hubble Space Telescope program. In 1994, Airapetyan was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Professor Edward Teller created the first hydrogen bomb and later studied astrophysics. 

“One day, I saw an ad for a position as a research scientist working with Hubble. They wanted to hire someone to explain the Hubble observational data on why old stars show strange spectral fingerprints. In 1995, I applied and later joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to explain this data. The competition was fierce, they had to choose one out of two-hundred people.”

Airapetyan began by trying to answer questions about the future of the Sun, which in six billion years will turn into a red giant and swallow the Earth. In addition to astrophysics, he started studying solar physics. “I submitted a project to NASA, which was accepted, and I became a scientist studying the Sun. That’s why I say that interdisciplinary sciences are important,” he says.

Solar flares and the origins of life on Earth

When asked about his argument that life on Earth originated from solar flares, Airapetian again refers to the work of Victor Hambardzumyan.

“He understood how stars are born. It made an impression on me when I was still in school. I understood that stars, like people, are born, live their lives, and then die. It's not as if stars live forever. Hambardzumyan found that these new clusters of stars, groups that arise and have their own lives, show that they are young, for example, they were born ‘x’ thousand years ago.”

Airapetyan points out that the Earth’s Sun is 4.5 billion years old, or the age of a 33-year-old human. It is a mature star that once was highly active and explosive. 

As to how explosions of the young Sun could have impacted our Earth more than four billion years ago, Airapetyan uses the following metaphor.

“In 2015, I told myself that if we want to understand how a child behaves, what his life might be like, we need to start with how he lived in the womb, what nutrients he received, what genetics, etc. Thus, if I want to understand the life of stars, I need to start from the exceedingly early age of stars.”

Airapetyan explains that our Sun rotated twenty times faster four billion years ago and start slowing down as they lose matter.

“Flares on the Sun show that clouds are formed from them, which move towards the Earth at a high speed of several thousand kilometers per second, compress our magnetic field, and phenomena such as the northern lights appear. These phenomena happened on the young Sun every day. It was more active, and the magnetic field was stronger.”

He continues that the Earth was being squeezed daily, meaning that particles were formed from those clouds that entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen did not exist then. There was nitrogen, carbon, and a little methane.

“One day in the middle of the night I started to imagine that these particles were falling, they were starting to separate, nitrogen was reacting with carbon, methane, and a new molecule could be formed, which is the heart of the simplest life, the essential molecule of life, from which everything started.”

Airapetyan says there was a chemist from France at NASA and the two calculated that this molecule has three atoms: hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. “It is the largest molecule of life, which makes up RNA and DNA. Later, we authored an article that was published in the science journal Nature.”

He explains that this essential molecule can descend to Earth, then interact with water to form more complex molecules, and that's how life can begin.

“Imagine, you want to bake a cake? What three things are needed - flour, water, and electricity. The energy comes from the Sun, the water is already there, and the flour is already the material that falls, and the cake of life is baked.”

Last year NASA approved and funded Airapetian’s proposal to launch his own laboratory (EPIC - Exoplanetary Particle Radiation Chemistry Lab) at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

“We recently published a paper where we showed that there is another problem. The young Sun was very ebullient and stormy, but if you look at how much light it was giving off, it was 25-30% less. This suggests that the Earth received less heat from the Sun, and it would have been a frozen ball. However, we know that the climate of the planet Earth was hospitable, the Earth contained liquid water, not ice.”

Airapetian says the paradox of a weak Sun has perplexed scientists in the past sixty years. 

“If it was weak, life should not have existed. The oceans, water, should not have existed. So how did life begin? Scientists have understood that it was perhaps like global warming. Maybe there were gases that kept that infrared light from the Sun.”

Airapetian says scientists now think that there was a lot of carbon dioxide, but it was one-hundred  times more than now. 

“Somehow this paradox can be explained, but in this case, water becomes acidic, and life reactions do not occur. In other words, you either get a hot planet without life, or a cold one, but with life. How can you solve both problems at the same time, so that it warms up, molecules arise? In 2016, I suggested that laughing gas could solve this paradox.”

Earth’s Sun will survive another six billion years

Airapetyan believes the Sun will become a red star, reach the Earth’s orbit, thus collapsing it.

“In a few billion years, there will be less hydrogen and more helium. When the hydrogen runs out and turns into helium, the Sun's core will become very dense and wide, and gravity will compress it. The temperature will increase, and it will begin to expand up to one-hundred  times, becoming a giant.”

He believes this process will take six billion years.  

Searching for life on Mars 

Airapetyan believes scientists will find traces of life on Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, and that the search will heat-up given the position of U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump.

“We now have three rovers on Mars. There’s a lot of evidence that there was water on Mars, there were oceans, rivers. Water is an important condition for life. We also want to find traces of life on Mars, or, as I described it in this conversation, a life cake,” says Airapetyan, adding that Trump will grant additional money to NASA to challenge Chinese missions to Mars.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is searching for signs of ancient microbial life, to advance its quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. 

The rover is collecting core samples of Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and soil), for potential pickup by a future mission that would bring them to Earth for detailed study. 

“They were supposed to go and collect the vials this year, but NASA said that they don't have the money for that right now, and we'll have to wait a little. The Chinese said, they’ll go and collect the vials, and we’ll own them. Now that Trump is set to be president, he's always said the U.S. needs to show its power. I think the situation will change, and money will be allocated for this.”