The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  “I think I have to quit,” I said. “I can’t do it. I can’t keep up.”

  I expected them to protest. I expected to hear them admonish me, to tell me how lucky I was to have my job. It paid well. I was successful. We were all dealt the same bad hand, Sara. Get a grip.

  The Widows didn’t say anything like that. Almost in unison, they said: “We believe in you, Sara. Do what’s right for you and your boys. Whatever you choose to do, you’ll succeed. You’ll be great no matter what.”

  I was stunned. Here were the smartest, strongest, funniest women I knew. I looked at them and I saw THE AMAZING WIDOWS OF CONCORD, superheroes in the never-ending fight against sadness, defenders of joy against the diabolical forces of grief. Part of me had still thought they must see me as a freak, even after all our time together; I still felt apart from them, though other than my boys they were the closest I had to family on Earth. I didn’t realize until that moment that what I saw in them, they might also see in me.

  Now Marc Kastner sat in front of me. He didn’t say that I would be great at whatever I did. Leaving, he said, would mean that I’d be giving up the one thing I was most meant to do. He waved away any idea that I might abandon my search, and took a more practical approach. He told me that he and his wife had both always worked, and they couldn’t have done it without a housekeeper. “You need a housekeeper,” he said.

  I told him that I had people—Jessica, Veronica, Diana, Christine—but for all the support they gave me, there were still jobs only I could do, and I couldn’t afford to pay them any more than I was already, or for much longer. My savings had been drained. Marc nodded. My problem—again, like all problems, like every problem—was a problem of statistics. I had help, but I needed more. That would mean I’d need more money. He put his hands on his lap in front of him. “How much money do you need?”

  Another question I had trouble answering. Sometimes complicated questions have easy answers: Can we fix the satellite dish? That’s a yes-or-no question. In my world, simple questions were the hardest questions of all. How did you sleep last night? What are you going to eat today?

  “Sara?” Marc said. “How much do you need?”

  Marc gave me enough. I’m not sure how he managed it, but he found the money for me to pay for more help. From then on, there would almost always be someone in my house—the company that I was paying to keep, and that in return kept me. If nothing else, I would have a little more time each week to breathe. His generosity also told me that even at MIT, at a factory of impossible dreams, my dreams were worth fighting for. On a campus where people were trying to cure cancer and give machines emotions and make spray cans of artificial skin, the woman looking for aliens was someone worth saving.

  Not long after, in December, Time magazine named me one of the twenty-five most influential people in space. This felt a little different from a physics prize that mattered only to other academics. The search for other life was becoming more legitimate. In a sliver of a century, we’d gone from members of my own community not believing that we’d ever see an exoplanet to the pages of Time.

  I liked the picture they chose. I’m wearing black, of course, but I have red lipstick on. The photographer wanted a background that said: MATH NERD. I’m standing in front of my office blackboard, filled with my frenzied algebra. The caption gave me the title of Earth-Twin Seeker, which was cool, although Elon Musk got Rocket Man and Michael Brown got Pluto Slayer. The last line of my biography didn’t leave much doubt about my beliefs: I wanted to find other life to “bring the Copernican Revolution full circle: Not only is Earth not the center of the universe; there are lots of other living planets out there as well.”

  When I arrived for that Friday’s coffee with the Widows, there were cupcakes with candles in them and Congrats! written in icing. I had to be told that we were celebrating me.

  The conversation soon returned to life at home. It was still hard for science to compete with the concerns of balancing checkbooks, with the perils of pursuing younger men, with another call from another teacher, concerned about the morbidity of a piece of children’s art: a cemetery filled with goblins, a sky painted black. In some ways, space would always matter less to me than it once did. What mattered that day was how well I’d done the laundry, or that the laundry had been done. I found pride, and maybe a renewed sense of determination, in each bill that got paid on something like time, each piece of chicken that came out of the oven edible.

  But then I looked at those cupcakes. I didn’t always feel capable or optimistic, but I had been given another reminder of the value of my extraterrestrial work. Keep going, I thought.

  CHAPTER 16

  Starshade

  I woke up crying on New Year’s Day. I had endured my first calendar year, 2012, without Mike. I remembered that terrible night, now two years gone, when we sat together at the kitchen table and took stock of our losses, soon unbearably to mount: “Next year will be worse.” I fought back with different memories, remembering my father and his unshakable belief in belief. It had become a ritual for me by then, the practice of positive thinking. I can be happy one day, I whispered, a decibel louder each time. I can even be happier than I’ve ever been. I might know a greater happiness than I did before.

  On January 4, with the boys headed back to school, and snow in the trees, the Astrophysics Division at NASA put out a call for applicants to join two new Science and Technology Definition Teams, or STDTs. (The fine people at NASA are good at space stuff, but they are true world leaders in initialisms and acronyms.) STDTs are committees of scientists, engineers, and academics—chosen from the ranks of experts within and outside of NASA—formed to tackle a specific, challenging project. I had first joined something like one back in 1999 at Princeton, to work on the ill-fated Terrestrial Planet Finder initiative. The committee dissolves after its job is done—or, as I had learned, left undone, because space is expensive. Space also demands perfection and is a very hard place to be perfect.

  NASA was putting together two teams for a pair of space missions they called “Probe-class.” By the otherworldly standards of space exploration, these would be modest projects. The goal was a workable, buildable piece of hardware targeted at a billion dollars; the far-reaching Terrestrial Planet Finder had been many times costlier, by a factor of perhaps five or ten. A billion dollars was still a lot of money, but in the scheme of governmental budgets, it was measured. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion. For a relative fraction of that, a good team working together on a worthy Probe-class study could make a miracle.

  The teams were going to examine two sides of the same problem: the ancient dilemma of trying to see a dim light next to a far brighter one. The first team would explore building a space telescope with an exquisite coronagraph of unprecedented sensitivity—an internal means to block out a star’s brighter light, the way we had tried to approach the problem all those years ago. The second would work on an external solution: the giant shield that had caught my imagination while I worked on the Terrestrial Planet Finder. It was time to try again to bring the best in science and engineering together. I still loved ASTERIA, but it was a backup plan compared to the sort of magnificent machines we might build. My old, shelved dreams felt in range again.

  I decided to work on the shield, because it represented something monumental to me. The human eye, as brilliantly designed as it is, doesn’t have a perfect internal coronagraph. Our pupils dilate, but they still have to be open for us to see; darkness only comes when we close them all the way, trading one kind of blindness for another. We’ve augmented evolution’s gifts by inventing hats with bills and brims. We wear sunglasses or draw the curtains. Why couldn’t we make something that would serve the same function for a space telescope?

  I reread the proposal, and I found my confidence rising. I examined this self-belief. It wasn’t irrational. It wasn’t hubris or the product of a desperate hope: I n
eed this. It was fact-based. I tried to imagine the sort of person who would be useful on such a committee. It was me. What sort of brain? It was mine. I knew darkness, and sometimes you need darkness to see.

  But reading through the proposal one more time, I felt a budding anger, too. What bothered me was a small note about how the committee would operate, the sort of thing that most people would read right past but that stopped me: The team, it was decreed, would meet face-to-face every quarter.

  I stared at my computer and fumed. The expected duration of the project was eighteen months. That would make for six separate meetings, mostly in California. Six meetings, far away from home. I could manage, if barely, the existing travel demands of my work. Leaving home six more times, for multiple nights each time, would guarantee the collapse of the delicate balance that I was forever trying to find. I would always have to be bad at something.

  If the people who had written that proposal had walked through my door at that moment, they would have witnessed the hottest of meltdowns. I would have scolded them for the cold, universal presumptions they made about how the rest of us might live and work. My children didn’t have two parents or any other extended family nearby. They had me, and I had them. I had always loved them; now I liked them, too. I liked watching Max work his way through a math problem, or build something beautiful and intricate with his LEGO, or survey some strange given about the world and regard it with his wry smile. I liked playing tennis with him and feeling the warmth of his serenity on our walks home afterward. I liked watching Alex perform for a group of adults, his fearlessness when it came to strangers and heights. I liked hearing big words come out of his mouth and wondering where and how he had learned them.

  I didn’t want to leave my boys anymore. I had compromised enough. I told the organizers of the Probe-class studies that their call for applicants, however accidentally, was discriminatory. One of them—he didn’t have kids—replied that he hadn’t thought twice about the travel requirement. Of course the committees would meet. That’s what committees do. To his credit, though, he saw the problem, and he saw the value in people like me, people who might be able to contribute but would not apply. He asked me how future calls might be more inclusive.

  My answer wouldn’t be mistaken for brilliance: Don’t confuse scientists with astronauts. Wanting to see and wanting to go are two different desires, and not everyone is willing to sacrifice so much for one concrete achievement.

  I was still upset, and I needed to vent some more. I had long stopped hearing the internal whisper that reminds us to be polite. I had been asked by the Huffington Post to write regularly about women and science; I hadn’t yet taken up the offer. Now I started typing. I wrote about my predicament, which struck me as a permanent, irreparable condition; I had the terrible feeling that I would always be trapped between my loves. My post was published on January 14, 2013, under the headline: SO MANY EXOPLANETS…SO FEW WOMEN SCIENTISTS.

  I began by writing about the explosion in our understanding of the universe, the celestial maps we had begun to draw. (Start with the good news.) Thanks to Kepler, we had determined that one in six stars like the sun hosts a planet the size of Earth. We had decided that seventeen billion Earth-size planets orbited their own suns in the Milky Way alone. Think about that. Seventeen billion. But most of them had been found by men. Why was only half our species doing nearly all of the job? Exploring space is a titanic quest. If we ever want to achieve what we believe we can, we will need every possible set of eyes. All of us deserve the same opportunity to help.

  I believe that hundreds to a thousand years from now people will find a way to travel to the planets orbiting the nearest stars and will look back at us as the generation of people who first found the Earth-like worlds, I wrote in a torrent. And, hopefully, long before that distant time we will have achieved equality for all humans. I felt like standing on a street corner and shouting at the top of my lungs: “There are so many different ways to see!”

  Despite my vocal misgivings, I still applied to join the committee. I had enough standing in my field that I felt certain I’d receive an invitation, but the choice whether to accept would be mine. I’d have to decide once again between my family and my work, between my desire to find another Earth and my wish to live my life to the fullest on this one.

  I tried to fall asleep that night and instead stared a hole into my ceiling. Through it, I saw the gleam of a giant, beautiful shield, hanging in space as though from an invisible string, and connected to a shining silver telescope, two stunning spacecraft working in perfect concert to erase star after star, there goes the Big Dipper, and there goes Cassiopeia, and in their place thousands of new constellations, the invisible collections that exist today only in the palaces of our imaginations, in those private museums we have dedicated to the safekeeping of our smallest lights.

  * * *

  ●

  An astronomer named Lyman Spitzer is credited with the idea of building a shield to work in tandem with a telescope. His name might sound familiar—the Spitzer Space Telescope is named after him, because he was also the first to imagine the space telescope. That was in 1942. It took Spitzer twenty more years to realize, in a paper published in 1962, that a space telescope could be paired with what he called an “occulting disk.” The thinking was simple enough. If we paired a telescope with a protective partner—if they could somehow be tied together but orbiting tens of thousands of kilometers apart—the shield could slip into place between the telescope and a star. Smaller, neighboring lights would then twinkle into view. In that same paper, Spitzer proposed the telescope that ultimately became Hubble. We built the telescope. We still haven’t built the disk.

  There are several reasons why. Humans have been building telescopes for hundreds of years, and space telescopes for decades. An external coronagraph is a brand-new machine. Astronomers hadn’t decided on the best shape for it, and engineers hadn’t invented the right materials with which to build it. Flying two spacecraft in unison is also hugely difficult. A telescope and its shield would need to be perfectly aligned for everything to work properly, and perfect alignment isn’t something that “just happens” in weightlessness. How do you fix two floating objects in space? And how do you make them so that you can move them to look at another star and fix them again? And again and again and again?

  After Spitzer’s paper was published, progress came in its customary fits and starts. A burst of activity and attention yielded some small but essential gain. And then…Nothing, sometimes for years. Looking back, it was as though our community was working together on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle. Someone would come along and put a few pieces into place, and then someone else would take a look and fit a few pieces more. There were still so many pieces to go. Complicating things further: Normally when you work on a puzzle, you start with the edges, tying together the four corners. With the shield, progress seemed to come from the middle out. We didn’t know if the final puzzle was a circle or a square or some other shape. The edges were what we were missing.

  I remembered a decade ago, during our Terrestrial Planet Finder days, when we were first introduced to the star shield. Not long afterward, we heard a second, soul-stirring presentation by Charley Noecker. A small team of astronomers and engineers, mostly from Northrop Grumman, had been hard at work, and he wanted to give us an update. A paper espousing a version named BOSS (Big Occulting Steerable Satellite) had been published, advocating a huge, square-shaped screen, opaque at its center but transparent at its edges. Some scientists had argued that it would be impossible to get that shading exactly right, and Lyot’s diffraction rings would remain a problem. Noecker and his colleagues agreed. They were among those eschewing the square.

  He unveiled a flower-shaped shield to us instead. From the start, Spitzer had wondered whether something like a flower might prove the best shape for his disk. Not only would the petals help eliminate the ripples of light that b
end around a circle or a square; they might diffract light in patterns that would yield an even darker dark. Now Spitzer’s insight had been confirmed. As with our coronagraph shaped like a cat’s eye, the inspiration for the new star-shield shape had been born of mathematics but was also found in nature.

  A flower.

  Years later, I could still close my eyes and hear that room during Noecker’s presentation: It was cast in a pure and total silence. Our meetings are usually far from quiet. There are whispers of dissent that sometimes expand into loud arguments; during boring sessions, papers begin to rustle or laptop keyboards are tapped. There is coughing. But on that afternoon, there had been a vacuum. A void into which sound disappeared, replaced by a luminous agreement. A flower. Of course. It should be shaped like a flower. It was always supposed to be a flower.

  But what shape the petals? And how many? That’s what I remembered most of all. I remembered sitting in that room in the silence and thinking: There are so many kinds of flowers.

  * * *

  ●

  The first time I worked on the shield was also the first time I found myself torn between my roles as a scientist and as a mother. It was 2003, when I was at the Carnegie Institution. I had gone to a Terrestrial Planet Finder meeting when I was extremely pregnant with Max—probably a little too pregnant to be focused on trying to find other life in the universe. I accepted the congratulations of my colleagues, but it felt strange to be congratulated for doing something that women are so expressly designed to do. Nothing had ever come to me so naturally.

  Max was a very new baby when I got a note from Webster Cash, an astronomer at the University of Colorado. (There is nowhere nearer on Earth to the stars than the mountains.) After BOSS, and after a similar proposal named UMBRAS had come and gone, Cash was next to pick up the baton. He didn’t want to make a pure shield, a star blocker. Instead he envisioned what was essentially a pinhole camera of almost unbelievable dimensions, an opaque square as wide as a football field is long, with a ten-meter-wide pinhole punched through its center. He asked me to join his efforts. Cash invited me along because he needed someone to make a model of the atmosphere of a simulated Earth. My coding abilities and my then-burgeoning knowledge of biosignature gases made me a good choice. I was, perhaps, Cash’s only choice. There weren’t many people doing what I did. I didn’t mention to Cash that it might not have been the best time for me to embark on such a big project.