The woman who might find us another earth

The star-crossed life of Sara Seager, an astrophysicist obsessed with discovering distant worlds, writes Chris Jones

Like many astrophysicists, Sara Seager sometimes has a problem with her perception of scale.

Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and that each might contain hundreds of billions of stars, can make the lives of astrophysicists and even those closest to them seem insignificant.