The Smallest Lights in the Universe

CHAPTER 1

A Stargazer Is Born

I was ten years old when I first really saw the stars. I was mostly a city kid, so I didn t often experience true darkness. The streets of Toronto were my universe. My parents had split up when I was very young, and my brother, sister, and I spent a lot of time on our own, riding subways, exploring alleys. Sometimes we had babysitters barely older than we were. One of them, a boy named Tom, asked my father to take all of us camping.

Camping wasn t my father s idea of a good time. Canadians escape to cottage country as often as they can, snaking out of the city in great lines of weekend traffic, aiming for some sacred slice of lake and trees. Dr. David Seager was British, and he often wore a tie on weekends; for him, sleeping in the woods was something that animals did.

But Tom must have made a pretty good case, because the next thing I knew, we were on our way north. We went to a provincial park called Bon Echo, carved out of a small pocket of Ontario, three or four hours from Toronto. Bon Echo includes a string of beautiful lakes, almost black against the green of the trees. There are white beaches and pink granite cliffs ­perfect for jumping off into the cool water, after climbing as high as you dare ­and thick red beds of pine needles on the forest floor. Bon Echo was the prettiest place I d ever been.

Maybe it was the absence of city sounds that made it hard for me to sleep. I was in a tent with my siblings. We had set up a little suitcase between us like a nightstand. (As usual, we had been left to our own devices, this time to pack. We had no idea that campers generally don t bring suitcases.) My brother and sister were making the soft noises that sleeping children make.

Jeremy was the oldest and tall for his age. He had only a year on me, but it was a crucial year, and he usually ended up in charge, dictating our daily activities from his great height. Julia was the youngest, beautiful and

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and a professor of physics and planetary science at MIT. Her research, which earned her a MacArthur Foundation Genius  grant, has introduced many foundational ideas to the field of exoplanets, and she led NASA s Probe-class study team for the Starshade project. She is now at the forefront of the search for the first Earth-like exoplanets and signs of life on them. She lives with her family in Concord, Massachusetts.

It is the easiest thing in the world to resign yourself to what is, to curl around yourself and your circumstances. This is a book filled with hope and wonder, because falling in love after loss is a defiant act of optimism, much like searching the stars for life beyond our own little planet. You ll leave this book feeling possibility and inevitability, comforted by the knowledge that even in the dark, we are not alone. Nora McInerny Purmort, author of It s Okay to Laugh 

Sara Seager s exploration of outer and inner space makes for a stunningly original memoir. Far from being dwarfed by the scale of exoplanets and galaxies, her most human tale of love, loss, and redemption is illuminated and given meaning by this backdrop. . . . A beautiful and compelling read. Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

I absolutely loved this book. It presents both cutting-edge science and the deeply human side of a MacArthur award winning woman astrophysicist. While searching for other planets in the universe, she grieves for her husband who died of cancer. Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures and The Autistic Brain

The miracle of this breathtaking book is the way Sara Seager s search for life in the universe mirrors her search for a fitting life here on earth. Who knew that so much love and beauty and hope could come from so much confusion and fear and grief? Who knew that the macrocosm and the microcosm could end up being the very same thing? Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations

Seager s beautifully written memoir strikes the perfect balance, weaving a richly told personal story with a clear and accessible tale of the birth and development of a new kind of astronomy the search for other worlds like our own.