The Search for Other Earths

At night, the sky above the Colombian coffee farm where Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Juliana García-Mejía grew up teemed with stars. On many evenings her uncle, an anthropologist with a love of astronomy, would gather all the cousins together to gaze up and think about the universe. 

“He started asking us questions such as ‘Do you think that the existence of the moon is important for life on earth?’” García-Mejía remembers. “I was absolutely enthralled. I really could not get enough of those conversations with my uncle. It became this kind of love for science that we shared.”

García-Mejía is still enthralled with the night sky—so much so that she has designed, built, installed, and is now testing a new instrument to search the heavens. This work was the topic of her 2022 Harvard Horizons talk, “The Tierras Observatory: An Ultra-Precise Photometer to Characterize Nearby Terrestrial Planets.” Her ultimate goal is to identify worlds that might support life.