‘Are we ready for this?’: Wknd interviews the astrophysicist who captured signs of life on a distant planet

At 45, Nikku Madhusudhan has made the discovery of a lifetime. How did he know where to look? What else could these gas signatures be? An exclusive interview.

Walking home from his University of Cambridge office late at night, Nikku Madhusudhan would often look at the sky and wonder whether we were really alone in the universe.

The professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science had always been fascinated by how the world works. As a young man, he studied geotechnical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU). He then earned a Master’s researching electromagnetic properties of meta-materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology