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Sara Seager is an MIT astrophysicist. She 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 that is enough like ours to sustain life. But after the unexpected death of her husband, Sara struggled with some of the new day-to-day tasks that she had to take on. She tells Jo Fidgen the story of how a three-page guide written by her late husband helped her to navigate life on earth, while she continued making ground-breaking discoveries in the skies.

Wanda Díaz-Merced is an astrophysicist from Puerto Rico. Unlike most people in her field Wanda is blind, but she has found a way to collect and study data from the stars and space. She uses a technique called sonification which changes visual data into sound waves, allowing her to hear the sounds of the stars.

Picture: Sara Seager
Credit: Justin Knight