The Smallest Lights In The Universe
eBook - ePub

The Smallest Lights In The Universe

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Smallest Lights In The Universe

About this book

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager interweaves the story of her search for meaning and solace after losing her first husband to cancer, her unflagging search for an Earth-like exoplanet and her unexpected discovery of new love.

Sara 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, her life became an empty, lightless space. Suddenly, she was the single mother of two young boys, a widow at forty, clinging to three crumpled pages of instructions her husband had written for things like grocery shopping – things 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 probing, invigoratingly honest memoir, Seager tells the story of how, as she stumblingly navigated the world of grief, she also kept looking for other worlds. She continues to develop ground-breaking projects, such as the Starshade, a sunflower-shaped instrument that, when launched into space, unfurls itself so as to block planet-obscuring starlight, and she takes solace in the alien beauty of exoplanets. At the same time, she discovers what feels every bit as wondrous: other people, reaching out across the space of her grief. Among them are the Widows of Concord, a group of women offering consolation and advice, and her beloved sons, Max and Alex. Most unexpected of all, there is another kind of one-in-a-billion match with an amateur astronomer. Equally attuned to the wonders of deep space and human connection,  The Smallest Lights in the Universe  is its own light in the dark.

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Yes, you can access The Smallest Lights In The Universe by Sara Seager in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technology & Engineering & Science & Technology Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Author’s Note
  6. Contents
  7. Not every planet …
  8. Chapter 1: A Stargazer Is Born
  9. Chapter 2: A Change of Course
  10. Chapter 3: Two Moons
  11. Chapter 4: In Transit
  12. Chapter 5: Arrivals and Departures
  13. Chapter 6: The Law of Gravity
  14. Chapter 7: Problems of Statistics
  15. Chapter 8: The Death of a Star
  16. Chapter 9: A Widow for One Month
  17. Chapter 10: Impossible Blackness
  18. Chapter 11: Life on Earth
  19. Chapter 12: The Widows of Concord
  20. Chapter 13: Stars Like Pearls
  21. Chapter 14: Sparks
  22. Chapter 15: Rocks in the Water
  23. Chapter 16: Starshade
  24. Chapter 17: Chance Encounters
  25. Chapter 18: Clarity
  26. Chapter 19: Flashes of Genius
  27. Chapter 20: Final Report
  28. Chapter 21: The Search Continues
  29. Acknowledgments
  30. About the Author
  31. About the Publisher