Sarah MacGregor Rugheimer

Sarah Rugheimer wasn’t looking for a career in astronomy. Born into a family of physicists, as a girl she sat her father down to deliver some difficult news: she wasn’t going to take a single class in physics. Bored by an accounting class, though, she switched into the only available alternative - physics - and loved it. Still, she knew she wouldn’t become an astronomer: in college she had a friend who studied quasar spectra by spending all day looking at squiggly lines, and the work seemed too tedious. But sure enough, a series of research projects brought her eventually to stellar spectral analysis, and now she spends her days looking at squiggly lines, too.

She’s searching for something much less forthcoming than her career was: signs of extraterrestrial life. “Even though something like 85% of the population believes in UFOs,” she says, “until now we’ve had no radio signals or other obvious ‘we are here’ contact from aliens. But now we don’t have to wait for life to contact us. We can go looking for it.” Working with Lisa Kaltenegger and Dimitar Sasselov, Sarah studies how the presence of life on another planet might be identified from what we can observe about its atmosphere. More specifically, she’s investigating how the light of stars will affect our ability to read these “biosignatures,” and how to overcome such interference.

For now, Sarah’s work remains theoretical: the first telescope powerful enough to search for these gassy traces of life on faraway planets won’t be launched until late 2018. But her work is already having an impact: recently, a researcher used her datasets to make a case for higher resolutions on a planned telescope. 

“I’ve never looked back,” says Sarah of her unexpected path. “To me, I’m studying one of the most gripping questions in science.”