Lisa Kaltenegger (Allen Lane (UK) St. Martin鈥檚 Press (US))
A planet where a year lasts just one week due to it whizzing around its star 70 times quicker than the fastest fighter jet. A scorched, Earth-sized world, with two suns, where rocks melt into lava, evaporate and fall as rain. Planets with surfaces covered in vast, deep oceans. Others where their sun never sets, unless you travel to the distant reaches of their cold side.
These are a handful of the weird and wonderful planets visited in hunting in the cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger. There is nobody better suited to take us on that journey. An astrophysicist and astrobiologist at Cornell University in New York, where she heads the Carl Sagan Institute, Kaltenegger has been working on how to find life on alien planets since the 1990s, when exoplanet discovery truly started.
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The book flits between memories from her career and chapters that explore the biggest questions about alien life, ranging from what we have learned about how life emerged on Earth to what the most unusual exoplanets are and how we can find them, plus, arguably the biggest question: how do we define life? It is clear Kaltenegger鈥檚 knowledge is deep and expansive, but she has a lovely way of explaining difficult concepts by breaking them down and using descriptive language.
We go from learning about the strangest life forms on Earth 鈥� from nests that glow orange and flying squirrels that turn pink under UV light 鈥� to beautiful descriptions of what it might be like to be on an alien world.
鈥淭he blue hues of giant storms intertwined with light gray rivers of air cover most of the planet鈥檚 visible surface, pushing against each other,鈥� she writes. 鈥淭he merciless sun heats the winds to speeds higher than any on Earth.鈥� These insights into alien planets and what we have gleaned from studying them are peppered throughout her book. But it is about more than just exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life.
We go with Kaltenegger as she revisits important moments in her career, from the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope to the first discovery of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, a place where liquid water could exist on their surface. There are intimidating conferences 鈥� and the view from her office (once inhabited by Carl Sagan, the astronomer and science communicator popular in the 1970s and 80s). These personal insights offer a refreshing change of pace from the book鈥檚 scientific content and they also provide important context for understanding Kaltenegger鈥檚 career and appreciating all her accomplishments.
In one section that does this particularly well, Kaltenegger recounts times when she faced sexism in her career. She recalls when interviewers started probing into her personal life to gauge whether she had children or might do so soon, or when her PhD student overheard colleagues speculating that she had only been given a highly competitive position because of her gender. Her reaction is stoic and logical. 鈥淔ind a group of people you trust and listen to their advice,鈥� she says.
Someone picking up this book expecting pure science might find these personal reflections jarring, but to me they are important to the story. And Kaltenegger is telling it from her own perspective.
She encourages others who might be discriminated against not to give up and asks those who do the discriminating to take a step back and look at their actions. 鈥淭he very best chance for humankind to be successful in this quest [for alien life] is to have the broadest, the most diverse, spectrum of thinkers working together,鈥� she says. 鈥淧eople from all backgrounds, cultures, and genders are needed.鈥�
