Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and
Technology in 2020 'A stunningly original memoir ... her most human
tale of love, loss and redemption is illuminated and given meaning
by this backdrop. A beautiful and compelling read' Abraham
Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone 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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