Sara Seager
The physicist and planetary scientist Sara Seager, who is known as "The Planet Hunter." She was born in the city of Toronto, Canada, on July 21, 1971. Sara was different from other children; she was a girl who loved to stay on the house balcony just to look at the sky with awe and deep contemplation.
During her childhood at the age of ten, her father took her on a wilderness camping trip where there was no light pollution. There, a turning point occurred when the young girl Sara was captivated by the brilliant sky with thousands of stars; she felt astonished and wondered: Are we alone in this universe? Or are there other planets that resemble Earth?
Sara received great support from her father, even though he was in the medical field. He helped his daughter with her passion for the stars and space by providing her with complex astronomical books and taking her to the observatory, and he contributed to encouraging her to study STEM fields.
Sara’s educational journey at university was not easy; rather, she suffered from academic and psychological pressures, and sometimes she felt discouraged by the complex curricula. She also faced another struggle with professors who believed that the passion for studying distant space worlds was merely fantasy and a waste of time. However, Sara resisted the discouragement and this skepticism until she graduated successfully from the University of California, obtaining her bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1994.
Sara completed her studies at one of the most prestigious universities, Harvard University in the United States of America, to pursue her PhD. In the late 1990s, she made a decision that shocked many of her professors when she chose the topic of her dissertation to be on the study of the atmospheres of exoplanets (planets outside the solar system). Sara faced ridicule from some of her professors and senior astronomers at Harvard; they believed that her idea was impossible and a waste of time because the planets were too far away and dark.
However, Sara did not give their words any importance and continued. Thanks to her skills in mathematics and physics, she developed amazing physics models in 1999 proving the possibility of seeing and analyzing the gases surrounding those distant planets when they pass in front of their stars. Sara obtained her PhD in the year 2002 from Harvard University, proving to everyone that what they had described as something fantastical was real science and the future of astronomy.
In 2007, because of her remarkable excellence, she was led to join as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is one of the most prestigious scientific and engineering institutes in the world. There, Sara began a new and defining phase in her professional life as she became a lead consultant for the American space agency, NASA, on the famous "Kepler" space telescope project, which was launched in 2009.
Sara utilized her genius in this project to develop techniques capable of detecting thousands of new planets. Thanks to her research, effort, and genius, astronomy shifted from searching for any planet to searching for rocky planets that resemble Earth. Because of her astounding results and her discovery of thousands of new worlds, the scientific community and the media named her "The Planet Hunter," and NASA even described her as the "Indiana Jones of astronomy" for her courage in exploring the unknown.
At the time of her rise and successes in 2011, Sara received a devastating shock with the passing of her husband, Michael Wevrick, after his battle with cancer. Sara lived through a difficult period of grief and the responsibility of raising her two children on her own. However, thanks to her resilience and strength, she decided to return to her laboratory at MIT, making scientific research her means to rise and confront her sorrows.
In 2013, she achieved an incredible milestone when she modified the famous Drake equation and formulated what is known as the "Seager Equation," which immortalized her name in global history. This equation focuses on searching for planets that contain biosignatures, which are specific gases like oxygen, methane, and water vapor that cannot exist in a planet's atmosphere unless there are living organisms or plants producing them. Thanks to this equation, Sara laid out the true roadmap for modern telescopes, such as the "James Webb" space telescope and the "TESS" telescope, for which Sara served as the deputy science director at its launch in 2018.
Sara did not stop her contributions; in 2020, leading an international research team, they discovered phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus, a gas that is considered a potential biosignature for the existence of living microbes residing there.
In crowning this amazing journey as one of the most prominent and greatest women in STEM disciplines, Sara won global awards. In 2013, she received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, widely known as the "Genius Grant," and she was honored internationally by the International Astronomical Union, which named an actual asteroid orbiting in space after her (Asteroid 9729 Seager) to immortalize her efforts. She also received the Order of Canada, which is the highest civilian honor in her country, and recently, she was awarded the international Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for the year 2024, which is considered the most prestigious scientific prize after the Nobel Prize.
Today, Professor Sara Seager continues her work at MIT, where she serves as a professor of planetary sciences, physics, and aerospace engineering.
