“Generally, when I’m on a plane, if I tell somebody that I search for life on planets around other stars, I don’t get to sleep,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, with a laugh. “It’s always a careful, curated answer depending on if I need to do something next morning when I arrive or not. People are like, ‘Oh, I read about this,’ you know, ‘Have we been visited? Is this true?’”

Outside of her need for sleep, Kaltenegger loves those questions. The 47-year-old professor of astrophysics is a pioneer and world expert on the search for