Astronomy Was My First Language of Science

May 21, 2026

This is almost a love letter. When I was a child, I was fascinated by two things: the universe and dinosaurs. Both made the world feel much bigger than the small part of it I could see, and both came with an endless supply of questions. How could we know what happened millions of years ago? What was out there beyond the planets I already knew by name? How did anyone discover things that were so distant, or that no longer existed?

My parents always encouraged this curiosity. I had books, documentaries and the freedom to become completely absorbed in whatever I was interested in. Science was never presented to me as something distant or reserved for a particular kind of person. It felt like a natural way of responding to the fact that the world was strange and full of things I did not understand yet. I knew very early that I wanted to be a scientist, and for most of my childhood that meant becoming an astronomer. My idea of astronomy was obviously much more romantic then. I imagined planets, telescopes and discoveries, statistics and long tables of measurements. Still, what attracted me to it as a child was not so different from what I eventually loved about studying it: astronomy is about learning to understand things we cannot touch or see up close.

Most of the universe reaches us indirectly. We receive light, positions, changes in brightness and other small traces recorded by instruments. From those traces, we try to understand what is actually there. A star becomes slightly dimmer and it may reveal a planet. Another star disappears for a few seconds and that brief absence can tell us something about the size or shape of an object passing in front of it. We rarely receive complete answers! We collect clues, almost as detectives. I think astronomy was the first place where I understood that science is not simply a collection of facts. It is a way of reasoning from incomplete evidence. Observations depend on instruments, measurements contain uncertainty, and the explanation we prefer is not always the one the data supports. Sometimes the most honest answer is a range, a probability or a list of limitations.

That way of thinking stayed with me… Even when I became interested in other scientific problems, I continued to be drawn to the same basic situation: something real is happening, but we cannot observe it perfectly, so we have to reconstruct it from the information available. Astronomy taught me to enjoy that process rather than seeing incomplete information only as an obstacle. It also changed my sense of scale. As a child, the age and size of the universe felt almost frightening. Later, those enormous numbers became quantities that could be measured and compared, even if they never became truly intuitive. There is still something extraordinary about the fact that we can study objects we will never reach and events that happened long before human beings existed. We are very small, but not entirely incapable of understanding what surrounds us.

Astronomy also shaped the way I think about scientific communication. Before I could understand equations or technical papers, other people gave me ways into science through books, images and explanations. They made the universe feel accessible without making it feel less mysterious. That experience stayed with me, and it is part of why I have always cared about sharing science as well as doing it. I no longer think that loving a subject means having to remain inside its boundaries forever. Interests change, questions lead elsewhere, and scientific lives rarely follow the clean path we imagine when we are children. But astronomy still feels like the place where I first learned how to ask questions, how to live with uncertainty and how to turn wonder into something more precise.

It was the first language in which science made sense to me and I still recognize its accent in the way I think.