A fate in the stars
David Charbonneau has loved the outdoors since he was a Boy Scout growing up in Ottawa. As a young man he was an avid hiker, a pursuit that eventually nested nicely with his growing interest in astrophysics and the dark, remote mountaintops where scientists turned the eyes of telescopes to the heavens. Now Charbonneau, a newly tenured professor of astronomy at Harvard, has become one of those scientists. Thinking back to his Scout days, he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t intrigued by the stars. His interest started as a pastime. “I had my little star chart, but being an astronomer didn’t seem like a real job to me, growing up,” he said. Charbonneau is humble about what he has accomplished. At 36, he has already had a fruitful career, making major contributions to the discovery of exoplanets, which orbit stars other than our sun. He heads the National Science Foundation’s MEarth...