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“I’m not going to romanticize any of this. The majority of your time will be spent in a cubicle, writing code and processing numbers.” As my advisor briefed me on the logistics of my summer research, I suppressed the urge to ask him how he got through each day, modeling dust in planetary systems that have no direct relevance to our lives.

My fortitude gave way as he was getting ready to leave. “So what happens if you do find a planet—what’s the point?” I asked.

“Well,” he said quietly, “ideally, one day, we’ll find a planet with bunnies and trees—one that is habitable. Maybe not in ten years, or a hundred. But ultimately, that’s what we’re working toward.”

As improbable as these goals appeared, they finally gave modern astronomy a place in the history of mankind’s fascination with the heavens. It was a welcome relief to know that this idealism and simple hope still existed behind the computer models, abstract theories, and equations. Walt Whitman describes in verse a similar reaction to an astronomy lecture:

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Before astronomy became a field more involved with counting pixels than with contemplating the night sky, the big picture was a lot easier to grasp—underneath the study of neutron stars, gravitational lensing and string theory, astronomy is a search for our place within the larger universe. For me, it lost a little of this romance with every required course, each a new affirmation that twenty-first century astronomy was an exercise in tracking blips across computer screens.

In an oft-quoted letter to a colleague, Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have been able to see further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” While my courses never passed up an opportunity to magnify the scale of these “Giants,” we were rarely encouraged to look into the distance for the ultimate goal of the Sisyphean cycle of undergraduate coursework. If I was having trouble seeing the purpose of my own studies, then it was easy to understand why so many American children become disenchanted with science around the same time that they lose interest in playing soccer.

There are many scientists who unconditionally love what they do, but I’ve never been able to appreciate science without a broader context. And though dust particles appeared laughably insignificant at first, their importance to the discovery of planets—and thus to the possibility of finding another habitable world—became clearer with each new simulation I ran.

The logic behind my research is relatively straightforward. A collection of dust particles in a solar system is much better at trapping heat and radiating light than a planet with the same mass, so through the lens of a telescope, a solar system outside our own looks like a glowing blob of dust particles. Analyzing the geometry of this blob, or circumstellar disk, is a lot like mapping the population of water buffalo to measure the presence of nearby predators: dust particles arrange themselves according to the influence of nearby planets. Simulations of these disks will allow us to infer the presence of unseen planets from future telescope data.

By the end of the project, I had worked out a generalized model of how these dust disks vary based on the masses and locations of the planets that perturb them. I came to understand how, as mundane as they had seemed, crunching data and running simulations moved us closer to finding another habitable planet—a discovery that may be as groundbreaking as Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, which displaced us from the center of the universe.

But it seems unnecessary that my appreciation for astronomy had to come through participating in research and not earlier on. It may be just as easy to lose sight of the end goal in other fields—after realizing that you’ve been writing the same environmental policy memo for the last ten years, or becoming mired in the thousandth iteration of a polymerase chain reaction. Perhaps we all stand to be reminded of the immediacy of our endeavors, whether we’re already looking out from the “shoulders of Giants,” or still working our way up.