‘We live in a golden time of exploration’: astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger on the hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life

Austrian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger has spent her life hunting for signs of life in the universe. Here she talks about aliens, space exploration and why studying cosmology is like eating pizza

Staring into the abyss... Am I really reaching anyone out there?" Lisa Kaltenegger is laughing about the unsatisfactory experience of teaching astrophysics over Zoom during Covid lockdowns, but she could be talking about her vocation: trying to discover if there's life beyond our solar system.

Kaltenegger founded the Carl Sagan Institute in 2015 to investigate just that. A burst of sunny energy and infectious enthusiasm on a grey day, she's speaking to me from the legendary extraterrestrial life researcher's old office, now hers, overlooking the leafy Cornell campus in upstate New York. The institute brings together researchers across a range of disciplines to work out what signs of life on other planets might look like from here, so that we recognise them if (or when) we find them.