The Smallest Lights in the Universe

An MIT astrophysicist searches for meaning in the wake of her husband's death, even as she scours the universe for an Earth-like exoplanet, in this powerful memoir of cutting edge science, unexpected discoveries, and new beginningsSara Seager has made it her life's work to peer into the spaces around stars—looking for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, Seager's life became an empty, lightless space. Suddenly she was a widow at forty and the single mother of two young boys, clinging to three crumpled pages of instructions her husband had written for things like grocery shopping—tasks he had done while she did pioneering work as a planetary scientist at MIT. She became painfully conscious of her Asperger's, which before losing her husband had felt more like background noise. She felt, for the first time, alone in the universe.In this...