James Webb Space Telescope: Astronomy’s rise of female leaders featured in SXSW

“I just remember seeing the stars and being overwhelmed by the beauty and the vastness and the mysteriousness of it,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s something almost terrifying about it at the same time as it being so beautiful, because yeah, it’s so unknown, and it seems like it goes on forever.”

Decades removed from that first look at the stars, Seager, 49, is among the world’s leading astronomers in studying thousands of exoplanets, or worlds that belong to other stars. The rise of exoplanets is of specific interest for astronomers and NASA months ahead of the scheduled launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the 30-year, $8.8 billion project that has long promised to tell us more about what might exist in the stars and galaxies that have long remained mysteries.

The search for life beyond Earth is featured in the documentary “The Hunt for Planet B,” which premieres this week at South by Southwest’s virtual film festival. Directed by Nathaniel Kahn, the film also looks at a new wave of astronomers focusing on exoplanets that are helping spearhead the discovery into the stars — one that’s predominantly led by women.

“It’s the next big thing,” Seager, a planetary expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of the anticipation in the astronomy community surrounding the Webb.

Nearly three times larger and 100 times more powerful than its successor, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb is scheduled to be launched from French Guinea aboard an Ariane 5 rocket 1 million miles from Earth, or four times the distance to the moon, on Oct. 31. It comes after a long series of mishaps and budget crises nearly derailed NASA’s biggest robotic science project — and that was before Congress threatened to cancel it altogether.

Yet, as the Webb completed its final functional tests last month at the Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., the missteps of the past meant little looking up at the machine — a gold-plated device resembling an oversized sunflower — that could help shed new light on questions long left unanswered. (That is, if pirates don’t get to it first.)

“I wanted to capture this incredible telescope coming together, which really is addressing the biggest questions that have haunted us since the beginning of time,” Kahn said to The Washington Post. “Where do we come from? How did the universe begin? And, the biggie, are we alone?”

About five months before the launch of the Webb, the film focuses on not just the telescope but the study of exoplanets and the female astronomers and scientists who’ve championed a field once considered too fringe and risky and still thought of as relatively new.

Seager remembers the field being born about 25 years ago when the first exoplanet was discovered around a star like the sun in 1995. At the annual conference for the International Astronomical Union, Seager saw how the cosmology part of the session was much more of a mature science populated with, as she puts it, “all men with white hair.” But when she walked over to another part of the conference focused on exoplanets, she noticed it was all young people, and mostly women, willing to take a chance on a new field largely ignored by many.

“I feel like then women could get a foothold, and women like me, like others you’ve seen in the film, were able to move up,” she said, emphasizing that older, White men still largely dominate leadership positions in astrology. “And then we could be role models for others.”

The study of exoplanets exploded after the Kepler Space Telescope launched in 2009 to detect the worlds that belong to other stars. Since then, the Kepler has found thousands of exoplanets that will be observed by the Webb — an achievement in a field with many of its leaders now being women.

“By being able to show that these teams of women are learning to work together and are finding that they can move much more quickly and be much more effective, they are changing the world by banding together and shifting an entire paradigm of how science is done and thought about,” Kahn said.

The film features women from all parts of astronomy, from an engineer on the Webb to the leaders of the Kepler. Among that group is Jill Tarter, chair emeritus of the SETI Institute and a legend among those dedicated to searching for extraterrestrial civilizations. At one point in the documentary, Tarter, who was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the 1997 film “Contact,” is asked by Kahn whether she thinks life exists and if it will be discovered.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” she replied. “We’re not doing religion here, we’re doing science.”

In an interview with The Post, Tarter, 77, said that while the Webb is an important step in cosmic observation, the public should not expect to receive significant answers, if any, as to…