by Sara Seager
The rocket carried Kepler deeper into the night. Within a minute, the last of its light was gone. Kepler was in space.
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We astrophysicists sometimes have problems with our perception of scale. Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which might contain hundreds of billions of stars, can make our lives and those closest to us seem insignificant. Our work, paradoxically, can also bolster our sense of ourselves. Believing that you might find the answer to “Are we alone?” requires considerable ego. Astrophysicists are forever toggling between feelings of bigness and smallness, of hubris and humility, depending on whether we’re looking out or within.
In December 2009, I was invited to give the John Bahcall Lecture at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. John had died in 2005 of a blood disorder. I’d been traveling when I opened my email; my heart dropped as soon as I saw the subject line: John Bahcall. I hadn’t even known he was sick. Just like that, I had lost the source of my most unwavering support. John had been more than a mentor for me. He was closer to my father in science. He was so much like my dad: kind yet demanding, encouraging yet critical. He, too, accepted who I was—in all my focused intensity, my lack of social graces—without reserve or explanation. It struck me as odd that a man who could think so expansively, whose brain could wrap itself around the architecture of entire galaxies and the mechanics of stars, could be snuffed out by a microscopic fault in his blood.
Although I was determined to give the talk, and a second, public lecture at the National Air and Space Museum, I warned my hosts that I wouldn’t be able to make it if anyone in my family got sick. I had reason to be concerned. Outwardly, Mike was his usual robust self, the picture of health, but like my father, he had been battling a series of small, strange stomachaches. Mike’s doctor told him to take Metamucil. Maybe he was constipated? I had serious doubts about both the prognosis and the prescription. So I was adamant in my caveats, even though honoring John meant so much to me.
Mike was thankfully feeling fine when it was time for me to leave. While I was waiting in the greenroom before my talk at the museum, I reconnected with my host, a scientist named Bob Williams, perhaps best known as the person responsible for the collection of images known as the Hubble Deep Field. I’d met him earlier in the day, and now we talked some more. I was almost surprised to feel what I thought was a budding friendship with him, a man so accomplished, so filled with resolve.
Back in the mid-’90s, Bob was the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and had held certain rights to Hubble. Over loud objections from many of his fellow astrophysicists—every minute that Hubble was in space represented an enormous window of possibility—Bob wanted to spend ten of his priceless discretionary days pointing the new telescope toward a tiny patch of Ursa Major, about the size of a penny held at arm’s length. The widespread belief was that the patch was dark, dead space, absent of celestial bodies, and it would be almost tragically wasteful to stare at the definition of nothing for more than a week. Even John Bahcall ranked among those strongly opposed to Bob’s plan. But Bob held fast, and Hubble took hundreds of images of that patch over ten consecutive, controversial days. The Hubble Deep Field revealed three thousand previously unseen points of light. Not three thousand new stars. Three thousand new galaxies. Bob Williams almost single-handedly discovered millions of billions of possible worlds.
“Stay in touch, Sara,” Bob told me after the lecture.
Almost as soon as I got back home, Mike told me that he wasn’t feeling well again. This time, his stomachache was different. It swallowed his body, and he collapsed into bed for twenty-four hours. I had a moment when I wondered, given my fears about missing the lectures, whether I had foreseen this turn for the worse. Mostly I worried what might be the matter with Mike. He rarely got sick. It was the time of year for the flu, and kids are germ factories. But Max and Alex weren’t sick, and neither was I. Only Mike was sick. It wasn’t the flu.
He got better for a little while. A week later, on a Saturday, he was struck down again. The pain was so intense that it made his forehead bead with sweat; his stomach seized with convulsions until again they released their grip. But almost exactly a week later, on the following Saturday, he was back in bed. I called his doctor. He told me to take Mike to the emergency room. I protested: “What is this?”
The doctor dropped his voice an octave. “Sara, this is serious.”
I roused Mike. He was so lethargic he was hard to move. I bundled him and the boys into the car. I got Mike into the local hospital emergency room in Concord and began thinking about what I could do with Max and Alex. I didn’t have anyone obvious I could call for help. By then, our regular babysitter, sweet and exuberant Jessica, had left for college. I didn’t have any other friends in town. My colleagues at MIT were people I could ask for help in getting a satellite into space, not to look after my children, and my father’s death had driven me further apart from my family than ever, spiritually and geographically. Desperate, I phoned the mother of a boy who was one of Max and Alex’s best friends. “Of course, bring them,” she said. I drove the boys over and tore back to the hospital.
By the time I returned, Mike was transformed. He wasn’t in pain anymore, and he had the hint of a smile on his face when I walked into the room. I wanted whatever drugs they had given him.
The doctors took an X-ray of his stomach, and it revealed a mass. There were a lot of questions about what kind of mass. In the cavities around it, there was only darkness. It looked as though Mike’s body were filled with ink.
We would need to wait for clearer results. It’s weird, waiting for word like that. I called another sitter, Diana, calm and no-nonsense. We had used her before, but she’d taken a full-time job with another family; when I called the day after Mike’s mass was found, I was surprised to hear that she was available again. I asked her to join our family. With the boys looked after, I sat with Mike in his room for most of the next couple of days. The rest of the world disappeared.
Mike lay wrapped in crisp white sheets while I sat in a cocoon of beeping machines. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the doctors to tell us. Part of me wanted them to find something specific, so that we could go about curing it. I couldn’t abide this kind of mystery. I wanted to find the unknown and make it known—whether that patch of space really is dark, whether we’re alone in the universe. But another part of me was scared by the prospect of finding an answer. I was scared what the answer might mean.
A couple of days later, Mike’s gastrointestinal specialist came into the room. He told us that Mike had a nearly complete blockage of his small intestine. “It’s a large mass,” the doctor said. “It might be cancerous. It might not.”
Mike was sitting up in his bed, quiet and calm. If he was scared, he didn’t show it. My mind immediately jumped to the worst possibilities. Here was my husband, with whom I’d shared Wollaston Lake and everything that came after, so strong and resilient and optimistic, and now all I could imagine was this apparition in his intestines taking him from me forever. I couldn’t lose him. Not now. Not yet. I had made him a promise; I wanted to keep it. I began crying so hard that I lost my breath.
“Stop crying,” the doctor said. He was controlled, but the way he said it, he might have been scolding a child for throwing a fit in a store.
I didn’t stop crying. I cried harder.
“Stop crying,” the doctor said again. “It could be nothing. He might not even need chemo.”
He left the room the way a storm blows offshore. Mike and I stared at each other in his wake. Mike’s eyes stayed dry. Mine stayed wet. In that moment, we looked at the same thing and saw two completely different meanings. Mike saw only the possibility of getting better. I saw another man whom I loved and who loved me, suffering from another stomachache. I saw no way out.
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On a recommendation, we booked a consultation with a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. His demeanor shocked me. He was slick and well-groomed, and he emphasized how mindless and routine Mike’s surgery was for him. “Everybody gets the same surgery,” he said, banging his hands on his desk at the end of the sentence. He did more than a thousand operations each year. We had to hope that the popular treatment was the best treatment. The surgeon told us that we could sign the contracts when we were ready, and off he went, presumably to open someone else’s husband with all the detachment of a butcher disassembling a pig.
Mike and I looked at each other. We both wanted cool professionals on our side in his fight. But we also wanted someone who still saw Mike and me as human beings.
I complained about the experience to one of my colleagues at MIT. Her sister was a surgeon at nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and with a few calls we got an appointment with her for the next day. Dr. Elizabeth Breen seemed the philosophical opposite of the doctor at Mass General. She was a leading colon and rectal surgeon, but she still had her humanity about her. She talked about how closely she studied each of her cases and how careful she was in the operating room. She made surgery sound more like an art than a trade. We chose her.
Mike went in for his pre-op appointment alone. It was meant to be short and routine. I was on the train back to Concord after a long day at work when he called to tell me that he wouldn’t be coming home that night. I could hardly make out what he was saying over the sound of the train.
“What? What are you talking about?”
Mike had been booked in for back surgery the next morning. His ankle was now frozen solid, and Dr. Breen wanted it fixed before she did her own work a week or two later, as Mike would need to be able to walk to recover. Everything seemed to be rising to a head.
I told Mike that I’d be right there. I could ask Diana to look after Max and Alex. But he said not to bother. It was rush hour. “Just go home and be with the boys,” he said. “Come in tomorrow.”
After I recovered from my shock, I remembered that I was supposed to fly to Toronto the next day to give a talk to a student group at my old university. Obviously I had to cancel. I hated to do it; I had spent my adult life meeting every commitment I’d made. I despised feeling unreliable. But sickness doesn’t care about your calendar, however meticulously your former self might have kept it. To alleviate my guilt, I called a professor at Toronto whom I had known since graduate school. He was a practiced public speaker, and I asked whether he could fill in for me. He asked me whether I was going to be paid.
“No,” I said. I told him that I had agreed to do the talk for free.
“No,” he said back. “I talk for money.”
The professor was already on campus. He could stand up in the middle of dinner and give a talk that would leave you soaring. An hour of his time would have saved me a lot of anxiety when I was already feeling anxious enough. I needed a simple favor from someone I considered an ally.
“Seriously?”
In the weeks and months that followed, I would be surprised by how much a few tender hearts would give to Mike and me. Beth and Will, our long-ago neighbors, would take us in like family at their Christmas tree farm whenever we needed their gentle wisdom and calming scenery. But far more often, it seemed, people would disappoint me with their callousness. The professor wouldn’t change his mind, and I took his rejection personally. I called and canceled my talk, and felt as though I had let people down. I also felt let down. Just as any one person, or even our entire planet, can seem insignificant with a change in perspective, what I thought of as my community suddenly felt cold and distant.
Mike was at the hospital, and I was at home. We weren’t alone together anymore; we were alone apart, and we were only in the opening rounds of our fight. Neither of us knew it at the time, but Mike and I had started parallel cycles, each vicious: For every potential cure, there would be a new concern. For every bandage, a fresh wound. For every kindness, a cut.
CHAPTER 7
Problems of Statistics
One of the great hurdles in looking for exoplanets is the time it takes to find them. The nearest and brightest sun-like stars are scattered all over the sky, which means that no telescope can take in more than a few at a time. But it’s prohibitively expensive, as well as nonsensical, to use something like Hubble or Spitzer to stare at a single star system waiting, hoping, to see the shadows of planets we’re not sure exist. Properly mapping a star system might take years. Bob Williams had needed only ten days to uncover the Hubble Deep Field, and still so many in our community had at first risen up in protest.
I had been trying to make a long-term plan to find another Earth. I wanted to invest myself in something. With the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission shelved and the James Webb Space Telescope on its way, the answer couldn’t be another giant, majestic machine. I learned about what the community had taken to calling CubeSats—tiny satellites designed to a standard form, which supposedly made them cheaper and easier to build and deliver into space.
What if I made a constellation of CubeSats, each assigned to look at only one star? I dreamed of space telescopes the size of a loaf of bread—not one, but an army, fanning out into orbit like so many advance scouts. Each could settle in and monitor its assigned sun-like star for however long I needed it to; each could be dedicated to learning everything possible about one single light. Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler—they each saw hugely. Maybe now we needed dozens or hundreds of narrower gazes, using the Transit Technique as the principal method of discovery. Earth might be ten billion times less bright than the sun, but it’s only ten thousand times smaller in area. CubeSats wouldn’t see what larger space telescopes could see, but they would never need to blink.
I talked to David Miller, a colleague and engineering professor who was in charge of what would become one of my favorite classes: a design-and-build class for fourth-year undergraduates. It was revolutionary when it started, because it was so project-based; after a few introductory lectures, the students dived into the challenges of making an actual satellite. I asked David whether I could use his class to incubate my CubeSat idea.
He was enthusiastic from the start. Maybe the best thing about MIT is that no matter how crazy your idea, nobody says it’s not going to work until it’s proved unworkable. And squeezing a space telescope inside something as small as a CubeSat was a pretty crazy idea. The main challenge would be in making something small that was still stable enough to gather clear data—a tall order because smaller satellites, like smaller anything, get pushed around in space more easily than larger objects. To take precise brightness measurements of a star, we would need to be able to keep its centroid fixed to the same tiny fraction of a pixel, far finer than the width of a human hair. We would have to make something that was a hundred times better than anything that currently existed in the CubeSat’s mass class. Imagine making a car engine that runs a hundred times better than today’s best car engine.
“Let’s do it,” David said.
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My life became a study in contrast, the light and the dark, the hopeful and the hopeless. I spent my days at MIT with my students, trying to see. I spent my evenings at home with Mike, pretending to be blind. His back surgery was considered successful, but he would never again have full use of his ankle. My mind sometimes wanders to those doctors at the Concord hospital, how they had ignored Mike and how he had accepted being ignored, with the result a ruined ankle. I understand that astrophysicists might think in the longest possible terms. I get that we’re among the few who count years in the billions. Still, I can’t help wondering why we so often choose to suffer lifelong consequences in exchange for some short-term efficiency. Why would we ever trade temporary discomfort for a permanent one? That is the most impenetrable calculus for me.
Mike came home to rest before his second operation in as many weeks. At last the time came for his surgery. We returned to the hospital. Mike changed into his emasculating gown, and we sat together behind curtains that we pretended gave us privacy. If there had been real walls around us, I would have been climbing them. On the outside, at least, Mike looked stoic.
Dr. Breen appeared in her scrubs. She looked prepared and confident. “It’s complex,” she said of Mike’s case, and I had a hard time understanding everything she said after that. I remember thinking her language didn’t match her brave face. She seemed to be lowering our expectations, preparing us for the worst. She was going to take out the affected segment of Mike’s small intestine and the nearest set of lymph nodes. If Mike had cancer, those lymph nodes would tell us whether it had already started to spread. They would prove either the gateway or the firebreak.