Looking for a Second Earth in the Shadows

Some dark, clear nights, when the blazing stars cast shadows down on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the astronomer Olivier Guyon steps away from his workbench and computer screens and walks outside the giant 8-meter Subaru Telescope to savor the heavens. Guyon began his habit of stargazing about the same time he first decided to become an astronomer, as a young boy in the countryside of northeastern France. At 17, he built his first telescope, a half-meter Dobsonian he still occasionally uses today. Guyon kept stargazing through college, then graduate studies at the University of Paris and doctoral work at the University of Hawaii, but today, in his late 30s, with waves of silver lapping at the edges of his dark hair, he can rarely spare the time. He steals a glance skyward, eyes large, and for a moment seems to be a boy again, starstruck for the very first time, before lowering his gaze and walking back inside to become a full-grown astronomer again, too consumed by his work for casual stargazing.

As an astronomer, Guyon’s tether to Earth has always been tenuous, but it has grown more threadbare ever since he began splitting his time between the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is a professor. Some weeks he spends more time in the air than on the ground, flying back and forth across the Pacific. If he ever gets jet-lagged, he hides it well enough, and his employers consider his work so valuable they don’t complain about the cost and trouble of his transits. Colleagues on both sides of the ocean know him for wearing Hawaiian shirts and an easy smile, as well as for his curious tendency