The Smallest Lights In The Universe

THE SMALLEST LIGHTS IN THE UNIVERSE

A MEMOIR

Sara Seager

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Sara Seager, 2020

Title-page art: © iStockphoto.com

Jacket images: Portraits © Cavan Images/Getty Images, RubberBall Productions/Getty Images; Stars © gaiamoments/Getty Images; Sun © AFPStringer.

Sara Seager asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008328276

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008328306

Version: 2020-07-28

Dedication

FOR CHARLES

Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction. To the best of my memory, everything that follows is true. Whenever possible, facts have been verified through secondary sources. A small number of names have been changed to protect the identities of private individuals.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Not every planet …

Chapter 1: A Stargazer Is Born

Chapter 2: A Change of Course

Chapter 3: Two Moons

Chapter 4: In Transit

Chapter 5: Arrivals and Departures

Chapter 6: The Law of Gravity

Chapter 7: Problems of Statistics

Chapter 8: The Death of a Star

Chapter 9: A Widow for One Month

Chapter 10: Impossible Blackness

Chapter 11: Life on Earth

Chapter 12: The Widows of Concord

Chapter 13: Stars Like Pearls

Chapter 14: Sparks

Chapter 15: Rocks in the Water

Chapter 16: Starshade

Chapter 17: Chance Encounters

Chapter 18: Clarity

Chapter 19: Flashes of Genius

Chapter 20: Final Report

Chapter 21: The Search Continues

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Not every planet has a star. Some aren’t part of a solar system. They are alone. We call them rogue planets.

Because rogue planets aren’t the subjects of stars, they aren’t anchored in space. They don’t orbit. Rogue planets wander, drifting in the current of an endless ocean. They have neither the light nor the heat that stars provide. We know of one rogue planet, PSO J318.5-22—right now, it’s up there, it’s out there—lurching across the galaxy like a rudderless ship, wrapped in perpetual darkness. Its surface is swept by constant storms. It likely rains on PSO J318.5-22, but it wouldn’t rain water there. Its black skies would more likely unleash bands of molten iron.

It can be hard to picture, a planet where it rains liquid metal in the dark, but rogue planets aren’t science fiction. We haven’t imagined them or dreamed them. Astrophysicists like me have found them. They are real places on our celestial maps. There might be thousands of billions of more conventional exoplanets—planets that orbit stars other than the sun—in the Milky Way alone, circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars. But amid that nearly infinite, perfect order, in the emptiness between countless pushes and pulls, there are also the lost ones: rogue planets. PSO J318.5-22 is as real as Earth.

There were days when I woke up and couldn’t see much difference between there and here.

*

One morning it was only the distant laughter of my boys that persuaded me to push back the covers. Max was eight years old. Alex was six. They were looking out the window, their faces lit with kid joy. It was a blue-sky weekend in January, and a thin white blanket of snow had fallen overnight. Finally, a bright spot. We could go sledding, one of our family’s favorite pastimes. After a quick breakfast, Max and Alex began putting on their snowsuits. With their plastic sleds stuffed into the car, we made the short drive to the top of Nashawtuc Hill.

The hill is a popular gathering spot in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s steep and fast enough to thrill even grown-ups. It can get busy, but not that morning. There wasn’t really enough snow to sled, and tall grass and weeds poked out of what snow was there. I tried to pretend for the sake of the boys that sledding would still be fun. I didn’t believe it myself. I’d spent my entire life searching for lights in the dark; now I could see only the blackness that surrounded them. But we had gone to the trouble of getting to the top of the hill. The boys might as well try to get to the bottom.

There were two other women standing at the top, mothers talking and laughing with each other while their kids played. They were beautiful, their faces put together enough to make me resentful. I looked at them coldly. I thought: Who gets up on a Sunday morning and thinks to do their makeup like that? They looked like a picture from a brochure for happiness.

Max was big enough to get all the way down the hill. Even if he hit the weeds, he had enough mass and speed to pass over and through them. Physics weren’t so much on Alex’s side. He kept getting stuck. He tried going down a few times but eventually gave up. Seeing his brother hurtle to the bottom was too much for him to take. Alex sat there, pouting, right in the middle of the hill. He wasn’t crying. He just spread himself across the hill and refused to move. If he wasn’t going to have any fun, nobody was.

One of the women called over and asked if I could shift him. He was in the way, and she was afraid he was going to get hurt. I understood why he needed to be moved. I was also spent, my best plans undone. I wasn’t in the mood to take orders from someone like her, from someone so pretty. I wasn’t in the mood to take orders from anybody. I glared at her and shook my head.

She asked again.

“No,” I said. “He has a problem.”

She smiled and maybe even laughed a little. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I mean, it’s just that—”

I ignored her.

“It’s just that the hill—”

“HE HAS A PROBLEM. MY HUSBAND DIED.”

When you’re in the ugly throes of grief, most people are repulsed by you. Nobody knows what to say or how to behave in your presence. Everybody’s scared of what you represent, and in a way, I suppose, you learn to want them to be. The distance that people keep is a sign of respect: Your grief warrants a wide berth. You come to crave the ability to influence the movements of others, your sorrow a superpower, your sadness your most extraordinary trait. You come to crave the space.

I thought the woman on the hill would be shocked. I thought she would recoil. Instead, she did the strangest thing. She smiled, and then her eyes brightened. She became an oven, radiating warmth.

“Mine, too,” she said.

I was stunned. I think I asked her how long she had been a widow. “Five years,” she said. It had been only six months for me. She’s forgotten what it’s like, I thought. How dare she laugh at me.

I had an overwhelming urge to run, to return to my bed, lashed by my storms of molten iron, but Max was still having fun on the hill. It’s moments like those, when you’re torn in two, that you realize how alone you are. You need to find solutions to unsolvable problems. I decided that I’d take the boys home, and we’d get Alex the iPad. Then we’d come back. Alex could sit in the car and play, and Max could still sled. Hopefully the other widow would be gone by the time we got back.

She was still there when we returned. Meeting beautiful new people wasn’t easy for me in the best of circumstances, and these were far from ideal. I had no idea what to do next. I tried to stand far away from her, to become even more repellent than I already felt. It didn’t work. She started walking toward me. I was mortified. Could she not read the sign that was around my neck? Did she not know to leave me alone? But this time she approached me a little differently. She was measured in her movements, as though she didn’t want to scare me away. She was still smiling, just not as widely.

She held a piece of paper in her hand. She’d written down her name, Melissa, and her phone number. She said that there was a group of widows our age in Concord. She spoke of them as if they were some kind of macabre troupe of acrobats, as though their name should be capitalized: the Widows of Concord. She said that five of them had just met for the first time to help each other through their new realities, their new parts as the abandoned ones. I should join them when they met again, she said. Then she smiled her warm smile and went back to her friend.

I would make six. I stood at the top of that hill and did the probability math. So many young widows in such a small town—Concord’s population isn’t twenty thousand—seemed highly unlikely. I had announced as much: “That’s a statistical impossibility,” I’d told Melissa. Then I remembered the previous summer, when I’d called Max and Alex’s camp to warn the director that their father was dying. The director said that it wouldn’t be a problem. “We’re used to it,” he said. I was taken aback at the time, but now I understood. Concord had more than its share of fatherless children, gone halfway to rogue.

I kept Melissa’s number in my coat pocket. I would pull it out and look at it day after day, making sure it was real. I was terrified that I would lose it, but I was also too scared to call. I’d never met anybody quite like me; why should I now, after I’d become even more of an outlier? I didn’t want to find out that the other widows weren’t like me after all. Months before, I had called a number I’d seen in the local newspaper, advertising a widows’ group, but the woman who picked up the phone had rejected me, saying that the group was for old widows, not young ones. She’d made me feel like a freak. In the middle of such sadness, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the world knows how you feel. And yet somehow there was a small army of women in my little town who knew exactly what I was experiencing, because they were experiencing it, too. Whenever I pulled out that that scrap of paper, I felt as though I were holding the last unstruck match in a storm.

It was nearly a week before I got the courage to call Melissa. The paper was nearly worn through by then.

The phone rang. Melissa picked up. She asked me how I was doing. Hardly anybody was brave enough to ask me that anymore, and I didn’t know how to answer.

“Okay,” I said. “Not okay.”

Melissa said that the Widows of Concord were going to have a party soon. She asked if I wanted to come.

“Yes,” I said. “Very much. When are you getting together?”

There was a little pause.

“Valentine’s Day.”

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 boisterous with a perpetual light in her eyes. She was everybody’s favorite. I occupied the middle in every sense, small and silent. I was the dark one. Jeremy and Julia have blond hair and blue eyes; I have brown hair and hazel eyes. My eyes were also the only ones open that night.

I unzipped the tent’s flap and ducked out into the dark. I wandered just far enough away to clear the last of the trees.

That’s when I looked up.

My heart stopped.

All these years later, I can still remember that feeling in my chest. It was a moonless night, and there were so many stars—hundreds, perhaps thousands—over my head. I wondered how such beauty could exist, and I wondered, too, why nobody had ever told me about it. I must have been the first person to see the night sky. I must have been the first person in human history who had braved her way outside and looked up. Otherwise the stars would have been something that people talked about, something that children were shown as soon as we could open our eyes. I stood and stared for what felt like hours but was probably seconds, a little girl who understood how to navigate the chaos of a big city and a broken home, but who now had been given her first glimpse of real mystery.

I was overwhelmed by what felt like too much light, too much knowledge to take in all at once. I ran back to the tent, curled up beside my sleeping sister, and tried to be just ten years old again, listening to the sweet sound of her breathing.

*

My father lived outside Toronto, in a series of neat and orderly apartments and bungalows. My mother lived in a former rooming house, in what was a battered part of town called the South Annex, with my stepfather, piles of old newspapers, and an army of cats named after literary characters. She was a writer, a poet.

I never became close with children who weren’t related to me, so I didn’t know how different our family was. When I’m feeling generous I tell myself that we were lucky to live without any of the usual constraints imposed by more conventional upbringings. I learned to believe that freedom is precious however it’s given to you, and our almost impossible freedom helped make us who we are today: Jeremy is a nurse; Julia is a harpist; I’m an astrophysicist. But when I reflect on the realities of our young lives, I can hardly believe we survived, especially when I look at my boys at the same age. We were cubs, turned out to run with the bears.

When we first lived in the Annex, we attended a Montessori school far outside town, near the distant house we’d called home before my mother and father separated. I don’t know why we stayed in the same school after our move into the city, but our commute was over an hour each way, including trips on two buses and the subway, with long waits at busy stations and platforms in between. Jeremy was maybe eight at the time, which would make me seven and Julia five. After a few weeks of trial runs, we made that trip every day on our own.

Jeremy would save up a pocketful of coins until he had enough to buy a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips, which we would carefully share. Just the smell of those chips today puts me back on those buses and subways. We filled time by reading newspapers—discarded by adults, or stolen out of the newspaper box after somebody bought one, before the door could slam shut—which I suppose was a positive. We were what modern educators would call “advanced.”

One day my sister fell into a muddy puddle at the bus stop that marked the start of our long journey home. After a tearful ride, a woman saw Julia still crying at the subway station and brought her into the women’s washroom to clean her up. She took forever, and I shuttled back and forth giving updates to my brother, who stood worried sentry outside. I try to imagine that scenario now—a woman finding three kids under eight on their own, one of them crying and covered in mud. I think today, most of the time, the story ends with a call to the police. In our case, it ended with a stranger putting my five-year-old sister slightly back together before we boarded the subway into the city.

I have memories that left more lasting damage. My stepfather was a monster, the kind of beast who normally lives at the dark heart of a fairy tale. He didn’t physically abuse me, but he could be unbelievably cruel, and his mood swings were vicious. I lived in constant fear of setting him off.

He and my mother were both still in bed when we left for school, having scratched together our own breakfast, our own lunch. He didn’t work, and my mother’s writing career wasn’t exactly lucrative, either. My father told me he suspected our entire family survived on his child support payments. When my mother and stepfather had a child together, my half sister, money was so tight that I wondered whether six of us were living off child support meant for three. Julia and I had to share our already cluttered room with the baby. She cried all night for months with colic, and she would wake up at dawn for a long time after, my mother ignoring my pleas to cover our east-facing windows. I was forever getting up to take care of the baby.

When I was nine years old, I decided not to walk with Julia to school one morning. (We had left the Montessori at that point, but our new school was still a mile-long walk away.) She would have been seven. I wanted to walk with one of my few semi-friends and didn’t want my little sister tagging along, so I told her to find her own way. Instead of taking the safer, quieter side streets, she took the main roads. At one especially busy corner, she was confronted by an unstable woman who howled in her face and tried to hit her with her bags. Julia froze and screamed for help. It took a long time for anyone to answer her cries. A real estate agent finally surfaced from a nearby office to rescue her. For days after, teachers at our school would ask me what had happened. “Not sweet Julia!” They were in shock.

“You are in so much trouble,” my stepfather screamed at me when I got home. I can’t remember exactly what he said after that, but these are the words I hear when I close my eyes: You are a bad person. What were you thinking? You are so irresponsible. You are an ungrateful child, and I am furious with you.

I should have looked after my sister. But I was also nine years old. That night I was the one who woke up crying.

*

We spent weekends with my father, at first in his apartment by the wide-open highways. Those two days felt like vacations from fear. My father took afternoon naps to catch up on the sleep he missed during the workweek, while my brother, sister, and I hung around his apartment playing games, often of our own invention. One afternoon, we went out onto the apartment balcony. He lived on the eighteenth floor. It was the farthest off the ground we had been in our lives, and, pretty naturally I thought, we decided to drop all sorts of objects over the railing to watch them fall. Nothing heavy: a comb, a doll. But gravity is gravity, and everything picks up velocity when it’s dropped eighteen stories. We watched our chosen projectiles land and strained to hear their moments of impact, learning a little about acceleration physics and the speed of sound. Then we rode down the elevator, gathered them up, and tried again.

When my father woke up and learned what we were doing, he was apoplectic. We could have hurt somebody, and we weren’t supposed to leave the building on our own. I didn’t even understand that such rules might exist, let alone that I was expected to follow them. I’ve since learned that a lot of scientists have mischief in their pasts, and their particular strain of mischief can be a good predictor of their future chosen field. Chemists, for instance, usually experience a period of childhood pyromania. Biologists might get a little too curious about what’s inside frogs. Physicists, somewhere along the way, drop objects from heights.

Though he didn’t like that experiment, my father was big on example, a teacher by illustration. His first apartment wasn’t built for a family, and we slept in makeshift beds, at least free from the worry that strange-eyed white cats named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would spray our clothes. One morning I was putting away the pullout I shared with my sister when I accidentally ripped the orange polyester blanket we’d been using. I had been conditioned by my stepfather to expect consequences for such carelessness, and I started crying hysterically.

My father couldn’t understand why I was upset: My reaction was so out of scale with the event. Unfortunately, he didn’t connect one dot to the other. He had heard us complain about our stepfather, but I think he thought we were the typical children of divorce, angry at our surrogates out of instinct. In the moment, he couldn’t see anything beyond his scared little girl, devastated by a tear in a cheap blanket.

I’ve never forgotten what he did next. He held the blanket on either side of the tear, and then he ripped it in half in front of my bloodshot eyes. He was trying to teach me that there are things that matter and things that don’t. But at the time I took a different meaning: Where you are changes everything.

*

As we grew up, I became closer and closer to my father. With him I felt understood. He was a family doctor for years, his bustling practice a cornerstone in the small town of Markham, north of the city. Markham grew into a city all on its own, and my father remained at the center of things. It was a slow build, but he made it, and he moved into a bungalow in the northern suburbs that seemed like paradise to me. My time with him had always felt like a reprieve; now every weekend felt like an escape.

My father saw that I was atypical, that my brain wasn’t like other kid brains. He sometimes worried aloud that I was too serious and unsmiling; once, while looking at some photographs, he showed me what he meant—that my eyes were sad and unfocused, as though I were staring at something that no one else could see. He confessed that he’d wondered whether I was developmentally challenged. Decades later I would find a label for my wayward gaze, a diagnosis that puts me on the autism spectrum. For now, and for the rest of my father’s life, I was just his daughter who was wired a little differently. I would spend a long time wondering—and agonizing—about my feelings of otherness, but my father gave me the gift of accepting me without explanation.