The Smallest Lights In The Universe

I was coming to understand that I would ask myself that question every day for the rest of my life.

*

Life doesn’t just need certain gases to survive. It also needs certain solids. It needs a rock to stand on. Perhaps, I thought, transiting exoplanets could prove valuable in yet another way. Radial velocity gave us the mass of an exoplanet. By watching that same exoplanet in transit, and measuring how much of its star it eclipsed, astronomers could now determine its size. High school physics teaches us that mass divided by volume yields density, and given an exoplanet’s density, we would have a pretty good idea of its construction materials: Dense would probably mean rock. We were still far away from seeing small, rocky planets, but here was a way we might home in on them sooner than we might with something like the Terrestrial Planet Finder. If astronomers could find a planet made of rock that also betrayed atmospheric evidence of biosignature gases, we could be looking at another us.

I turned my full attention to the avenues of discovery opened by the Transit Technique. I didn’t have much interest in confirming the existence of exoplanets that we had already discovered. I wanted to do better. I wanted to find new worlds passing in front of new suns.

Like every investigation into space, the Transit Technique had its complications. Bodies don’t often align. We would need to see the smallest passages, a tiny speck on an endless horizon, and we would have to see those passages repeat, as regularly as an orbit. That would require our looking at the same star for long periods. If aliens were using the same technique to find us, they would have to wait at least a year to confirm that Earth is a planet. (Closer to two years if they had just missed us the first time around.) The bigger problem, as far as my hopes were concerned: Even if we could somehow train a camera on an exoplanet during its transit in front of its star, what would we see? We’d see what we see of the moon during an eclipse. We’d see its silhouette, but nothing of its surface. We’d see black. I wanted a familiar blue dot in the sky. I wanted alien oceans, evaporating into alien clouds.

*

Happily, walking in the footsteps of Einstein at the Institute made me feel capable of miracles. Not coincidentally, I was also in a place where I could finally make a friend. I still had a hard time navigating social situations; once, dressed nicely for a work event, I said to Mike, a little excitedly, “I can pass for normal!” He smiled. “Yeah, until you start talking.” Despite my being among so many like-minded colleagues, I sometimes saw things too starkly. I might change my mind about something, but if I did, I would swing from one extreme to the other. I rarely saw gray.

Gabriela was far from gray. A blond, blue-eyed Mexican astronomer, she was working on her postdoctoral fellowship, shuttling between Princeton and astronomy institutes in Chile. Gabriela and I soon saw each other as allies. We were both young, both ambitious. We both wanted to join the ranks of discoverers. Gabriela could also apply to use Chile’s enviable ground-based telescopes, which, for me, was like finding out your crush happens to come from money. At the time, the Institute’s offices were under renovation, and Gabriela and I huddled in a cloud-white trailer in a corner of the grounds. Spending time with her was a little like spending time with Mike: We were two of a distant pair.

Gabriela was incredible at math. It flowed through her more innately than music; it was something like spiritual. She had a preternatural ability to design simple yet expansive algorithms, and her access to telescopes meant that she could collect new data to feed them. I was good at interpreting those numbers with my efficient computer code. Gabriela was the library; I was the reader.

We set ourselves the immodest goal of finding the first previously undiscovered exoplanet using the Transit Technique. Together we shared that tingle of anticipation known only to explorers, flush with the almost childlike joy that fuels every adventure. Like other astronomers trying to stake the same claim, we thought it best to use a telescope with a wide-field camera, capable of monitoring tens of thousands of stars at a time. We wanted to buy multiple tickets for the same lottery. Gabriela and I also knew that we wouldn’t be able to find an Earth-size planet just yet. A new Hot Jupiter, massive with a short orbit, would still be a titanic discovery in every sense.

Gabriela and I began hanging out beyond work, too. Mike liked her, and the three of us had frequent dinners together. She even looked after our menagerie of pets when we went on another long Arctic canoe trip. Gabriela and I became a team and, with time, a successful one. She flew to the telescope in Chile and diligently couriered tapes filled with astronomical data to me. I ran the data through my new lines of code, based on her stunning algorithms. We felt on the verge of greatness.

There was one moment when Gabriela and I thought we’d found a planet. We were strung through with adrenaline. Astronomers all over the world were trying to beat us, and we were trying to beat them, but making a claim that proved untrue would destroy our careers. We looked at the data and had to admit that something wasn’t quite right. At the end of our three weeks of allotted observing time, Gabriela flew home from Chile. We sat down in her office at the Institute to solve our dilemma. It was long past dark. Harsh fluorescent light reflected off our cherry tabletop as we scribbled away, pounding through algebra. Papers covered with equations piled up around us. Some fell to the floor. In that chaos we confirmed that we were seeing bodies in transit, absolutely. But the shape wasn’t right; the numbers didn’t add up. We looked at each other and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

We came to the realization at the same time: We hadn’t found a planet. We’d found a strange tangle of stars—what astronomers today call a “blend.” One star had passed in front of another, but a third, nearby star was contributing just enough light to the equation to lessen the starkness of the eclipse. It made a star look the size of a planet. Our only victory was that we had kept our confusion private.

Gabriela and I never did succeed. During our shared quest, she answered frequent questions from an older, famous astronomer. She thought he was just curious, interested in our progress and perhaps impressed with our strategy. Later that summer we found out he was competing with us. He didn’t steal our secrets; Gabriela gave them away. I was frustrated with her and with the situation—the other professor would have probably succeeded even without his duplicity. Time will tell the truth. Gabriela was devastated. I thought she would pull out of her dive and we would redouble our efforts in the ways that only she and I could. But she never recovered her enthusiasm for our project, and it felt as though she was also losing her interest in me. I felt let down. Abandoned.

In the fall of 2002, the older professor’s team put out a list of transiting planet candidates, including a previously unknown planet, OGLE-TR-56 b, in the constellation Sagittarius. Another team used radial velocity to confirm the finding, winning the accolades that come with being first. I spent two days crying. My father was visiting and took me to New York City for an afternoon. I told him of my disappointment while we walked the crowded streets; he bought me some camera equipment, as if to tell me that there were millions more things still to see.

Then I had a conference in Seattle to attend, and Mike and I took the chance to go on a long hike on Vancouver Island. He didn’t understand why being first in such an esoteric way mattered. His inability to understand my sadness was maddening, but he also helped give me a sense of perspective. My work would have its highs and lows, but Mike would always be there. Nothing had changed in the real world. I watched a bald eagle fly through a river canyon in front of me and thought: Everything is going to be okay.

In the middle of that race to find the first transiting exoplanet, my near-disaster with Gabriela led to a different kind of achievement. The equations that describe the dimming of starlight held another secret: They could be used to calculate the density of a planet-hosting star, which would help us eliminate false positives, such as the effects of our mischievous trio. We stayed up late one night and figured it all out—how our wrong could help others make sure they were right. It was hard for me to sit with Gabriela to write up our work for publication, staring into the heart of our dissolving partnership, but we could still salvage something of our time together. We published the lessons of our near miss, and that paper became one of my mostly widely cited. It was the consolation prize I received in exchange for the end of our friendship.

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