An asteroid is named after him!

It’s called Kaltenegger 7734.

Are you excited?

Courtesy of my colleagues, I only asked them for one thing.

That?

That it was not going to collide with the Earth.

Reasonable.

It completes its orbit around the sun every three of our years without crossing Earth.

Why 7734?

I was born in ’77, on March, the 4th.

Why did they give him this gift?

For investigating exoplanets.

What is an exoplanet?

A planet similar to Earth, in another solar system.

An extrasolar Earth. There’s a lot?

There are 200 billion stars: in every five there is a planet similar to Earth.

40 billion exoplanets!

Planets like Earth in size and distance from its sun. I’m looking for it with the JWST (James Web Space Telescope): six and a half meters lens diameter.

And what do you see?

One hundred lands! I scan the atmospheres of one hundred exoplanets: their spectrography reveals the presence of water and carbon…

And oxygen?

There was no oxygen in the first Earth’s atmosphere, there was CO2 and methane: if I detect them on an exoplanet, I get excited!

How did life begin on Earth?

Maybe in a puddle.

Oh.

Water and a ray of sun. Or in the crater of an underwater volcano… Joan Oró left us a certainty: warm, sulfuric water with minerals made a chain of molecules possible. And then… life!

Could an asteroid have brought it?

Many impacts could have brought chemical elements precursors of organic chemistry, but not directly life.

The Earth, then, is the casserole of life.

Someday we will know how inorganic chemistry changed to organic on Earth.

And what excites you most about searching outside?

Travel in time.

Sorry?

I see very young or very old lands: I see how the Earth was and how it will be.

We already know its age, now tell me the age of the universe.

It has turned 13.8 billion years old.

And earth?

About 4,543 million years.

And when is life born here?

About 2,000 million years ago.

Which of the exoplanets you spy on is most similar to ours?

Trappist 1e and Kepler 62f: similar diameter and mass, ferrous core, rocks, water, atmosphere, temperate…

Where are they?

The star Trappist 1 is only 40 light years away. The star Kepler 62, somewhat more distant, is 1,000 light years away. I discovered it in 2013.

And what did you feel?

Being the only person in the world to know something for a few hours… gave me the most intense pleasure of my life!

Did seeking that pleasure make her an astronomer?

Well yes; Since I was a child I wanted to understand everything, everything! And that desire, in a big way, led me to astrophysics. And to Carl Sagan’s table.

At Carl Sagan’s table?

I sit every day in his chair, at his desk, in his office, and I see through his window the same thing that he saw.

What did Carl Sagan mean for cosmological science?

He was the wise man who spread his love for science to millions of people, with the television series Cosmos.

A television marvel: history, philosophy, poetry and science.

Thousands of current scientists are because of him. And he was the father of the Voyager mission. And responsible for tracking the cosmos with radars to capture intelligent signals.

He was his predecessor and inspiration.

Yes, but I prefer to look at the cosmos with the JWST space telescope than with radars: it is my eye for searching for exoplanets.

Don’t you seek to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences, like him?

What if they avoid us because they are not interested in us? Better to look for exoplanets and deserve to be considered intelligent, and one day we will have something valuable to offer.

Is this your hypothesis?

Preventively, I would say that we are not being very popular in the cosmos. I would love to debate this with Sagan!

Are they scrutinizing us?

It’s possible. We will deserve to contact some extrasolar intelligence perhaps in 500 years. Or in 5,000 years…

Well, that’s only if we stay here.

We are very conflictive, but I am confident: we will move forward. Girls, boys: study science and come help me!