When the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, Sara Seager and Dave Charbonneau were graduate students at Harvard. Both were studying topics totally unrelated to planets orbiting distant stars.

The AstroAI initiative, launched in 2023, uses AI to search for life on exoplanets, such as the exoplanet WASP-39 b imagined in this illustration. IMAGE NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) Could ...