Lisa Kaltenegger (Kuchl, Austria, 45 years old) wants to be the first person to find life on a planet beyond our solar system. In 1995, when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first exoplanet, the young Kaltenegger had just started university to study engineering and astrophysics. Less than 30 years later, we know of more than 5,000 of these worlds. About 40 of them are Earth-sized and may have liquid water. Kaltenegger, director of the Karl Sagan Institute at Cornell University (USA), is leading a project to observe the only three of these worlds that we can reach with current telescopes. “There is a fascinating fact,” she explains in this interview given in Armenia during the festival. Starmus VI“We now know that in our galaxy, the Milky Way, alone there may be 40 billion habitable planets. And there are billions of galaxies in the universe. I'm often asked if there is life in the universe. With these numbers, the surprise will be if we don't find it.”
