In our Solar System, there are two planets too hot to host liquid water, five planets too cold for it, and just one in between. This middle ground — a range of distances from the Sun where surface water can flow and life could evolve — is called the “habitable zone”; occasionally, the “Goldilocks zone.” This concept seems simple at first glance, but it actually presents a number of challenges for astronomers who wish to communicate new discoveries to the public.

“You’re evacuating, right?” I tapped out on my phone late one summer morning in September 2022.

Hurricane Ian was bearing down on Ft. Myers, Fla. My father, a Florida native and seasoned shelter-in-place hurricane survivor, texted me his grab-and-go list as he fled his home there: important paperwork, the dog, two outfits. “I’m not taking any chances with this one,” he said.

Description goes hereWhen Corrine Rojas saw the speckled rock on the surface of Mars for the first time, she didn’t say “Eureka!,” she said, “Now Percy’s cooking with gas!” Rojas, who is a mission science operations specialist at NASA Goddard and former instrument operations engineer for the Perseverance rover (fondly known as “Percy”), knew it was something special right away.

In the constellation Aquarius, invisible to the naked eye, lies a star that might change history. Home to seven mysterious planets—each around the size of our own Earth—the TRAPPIST-1 system is regarded by some as the crown jewel of astronomy’s efforts to find life in the Milky Way. With not one, but three worlds orbiting in the so-called habitable zone, where water can flow and life can thrive, TRAPPIST-1 is one of humanity’s best and brightest opportunities to chase the discovery of a lifetime.

Growing up, I asked a lot of questions. Many of them foretold my future in astronomy: Why is the Sun yellow? Why do the constellations look like that? Why does Jupiter have a spot? My parents answered what they could, and bought me books to answer the rest. But my most frequent question, starting when I was about 5 years old, was why am I a girl? And for that, my parents had no answer. In fact, in the 1990s, in the foothills of the Appalachians, no one did. It was my first encounter with a question that has no simple answer.

Academic science was not built for marginalized people. People of color (especially Black and Indigenous scientists), people of marginalized genders (including women, nonbinary and transgender folks), queer scientists, disabled people, and those coming from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background have historically been excluded from research by those with power and privilege. This particularly applies to scientists who occupy the intersection of two or more of these identities—like me. I am a queer and nonbinary astrophysicist, a victim of workplace bullying and abuse, and, like so many before me, am making the heart-breaking decision to leave academia.

In movies, humans encounter aliens in a variety of ways. They come to us, like in Ted Chiang’s “Arrival,” or we go to them, like Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” or perhaps some resolute scientist detects a radio signal from a nearby star, like in Carl Sagan’s “Contact.” Out of these three scenarios, a radio signal seems like the most likely — no one has to invent interstellar spaceships, for example, or worry about how to breathe in someone else’s atmosphere.