Sarah Angela Nacario was on a house building project in the Dominican Republic when she captured this image of a child’s princess dress lingering over the mountains of Ocoa. During her last day in La Cruz de Santana, clothing donations were distributed to the people of the community – the inspiration for the photo came from this moment. “I wanted to capture the beauty of the mountains and the princess dress that symbolized hope for a child’s development and better future in the mountains of Ocoa,” says Sarah. Aside from using a little contrast to enhance the vividness of the photo, the original image remains untouched.

Now in her fifth year at St. Michael’s College, Sarah is studying sociology and global health with the hopes of working for an international development organization in the future. Since the inception of digital cameras, Sarah took miscellaneous photos to use in her web designs, and later expanded her work to the field of event photography. After traveling to various places around the globe, Sarah concluded that her favourite portraits are the ones that can frame the most life-altering experiences. “I photograph memories and people from travels,” she says. “It helps me remember those who contributed to my life in a way that material goods cannot.”

Visit Sarah’s Website

Jiyoung Park, left, and Max Jungho Bae

Max Jungho Bae, a student in the master of management and professional accounting program, surprised his girlfriend of 10 years – and dozens of fellow alumni – by dropping to one knee and proposing to her at a mixer in downtown Toronto. “Jiyoung, even though I served in the Korean army as an officer for three and a half years, you have waited for me,” he said. “Now it’s time to settle down. I love you.”

In an interview afterward, Bae said he wasn’t nervous because he had asked Jiyoung to describe her ideal marriage proposal. “I never said a public proposal,” clarified his now-fiancée, Jiyoung Park (BA 2006 Woodsworth, MA 2007). “I wanted a surprise.”

Bae made careful preparations for the big moment, collaborating with organizers to ensure that Park’s name would be the final one to be drawn in a raffle. “The last prize is a big one,” the emcee announced, before calling Park, the “winner,” to the front of the room. She was told to close her eyes as Bae made his way to the microphone.

Bae and Park first came into contact with each other in 2002 through an online forum of Yonsei University in Seoul, where Bae was studying. Park, a Yonsei alum, was living in Canada. Soon they were talking every day via instant messenger.

They didn’t actually meet until two years later, when Park got a summer internship in South Korea. At that point, they realized their bond was “real,” says Bae.

Eight months ago, Bae moved to Toronto. He paid for the ring partly through honoraria from psych experiments and got Park’s friend to suss out her ring size. Then it was just a matter of finding the right moment to propose.

The setting was far from traditional. Surrounded by spotlit ping-pong tables at the Spin Galactic club and pools of orange ping-pong balls on the floor, Bae got down on one knee and presented the ring. “Will you marry me?” In her excitement, Park reached for the ring, and Bae put it on her finger. Then she remembered to say yes.

Simeon triumphed in the two-hour finale of the tri-campus singing competition, held at Hart House in March, with his versions of “Back at One,” by Bryan Adams and an original song called “Writer’s Block,” which included a beatboxing interlude. He won over the packed room with the Adams song, especially when he hit a difficult falsetto.

For his efforts, Simeon won $200 and 10 studio hours at CIUT. He plans to use the studio hours to record an EP – a short album of five songs. “I have maybe three songs ready. I still need to write,” he says.

Simeon, who is a second-year specialist in sociology and psychology, began performing and writing songs just three years ago. He describes his sound as acoustic R&B, but adds that he’s not limited to that genre and plays anything that catches his ear.

The first song he wrote was a Christmas present for his girlfriend at the time. He began taking music seriously last year, and now considers it to be more than a hobby. “It’s been my lifestyle,” he says. “If I get the chance to pursue it full-time, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

Three student musicians sat on the judging panel. On American Idol, the female judge is “the nice one,” but in the U of T version all three judges were nice. Their most common criticism was stage nervousness, which diminished for most contestants during their second song.

The long road to the finals began last fall when the judges selected 25 performers based on audio clips from 44 hopefuls. The finalists were drawn from previous rounds of the competition.

Katie Lai kicked off the show with “Forget You,” the gentler version of Cee-Lo’s hit, and impressed the judges with her vibratos. Rudy Silvamer donned a pair of bright red sneakers and belted out “Billie Jean,” in what one judge called “a super-fun fantastic song choice.”

Second place went to Sherry-Lynn Lee, who was the only contestant apart from Simeon to sing a song she wrote. She received $100 and a guaranteed spot on next year’s U of T Idol. Third prize and $50 went to Kristine Routhier, who had a smoky, soulful voice. She had only sung in public twice before.

The evening was organized by third-year student Farhan Husain, with the help of Hart House staff and the Hart House Music Committee; Husain also emceed the event.

After earning a degree in physics and cellular and molecular biology from U of T, she had landed a job designing lasers at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics. And as a pre-teen, she had figured out how to make thousands of dollars in the virtual economies of massive multi-player online role-playing games.

But neither her education nor her experience were enough to truly prepare her for a contest in which she was required to demonstrate ability in six areas of “intelligence” – logical, visual, physical, linguistic, musical and social – in front of a live television audience. In the end, she fell just shy of the title, placing second to CFL offensive lineman Peter Dyakowski.

It turns out having to think and react quickly in front of a cheering live audience is not as easy as it looks. “I was surprised by how distracting that was,” she says. In the two-person final against Dyakowski, Suen flubbed a simple math question that one might think she, as a science grad, could have aced. “The misconception is that physics majors should be good at mental math. Not true. We’re good at learning complicated math,” she says.

Suen says she found the musical challenge especially interesting. Contestants were asked to listen to a 30-second track with 10 instruments. The track was played a second time, but with four instruments dropping out. They had to identify which instruments left and when, with only 10 seconds to lock in answers. “All these challenges were really fast,” says Suen. “There was no time to think. You either had it or you didn’t.”

In the linguistics challenge, 30 to 40 random words flashed on a screen. Contestants spun a wheel to determine a category, and then had to give a speech on that topic, incorporating as many of the words as possible.

Sometimes the speed and frenzy didn’t make sense to Suen. In the “social challenge,” contestants were awarded points for a two-minute free-for-all debate on the best invention in human history. Suen chose the Internet and came in last place. “We were encouraged to talk over each other. I’m not completely sure how this evaluated social skills,” she says. “The guy who talked the least was the one who got the most points.”

Even though she didn’t win the title of smartest, Suen still appreciated the experience. “I was terrible, but it was a lot of fun,” she says. “When you get in the zone, you turn into a different person. At one point, I told the host to shut up. I normally would not tell the host to shut up.” Being the youngest contestant and the only woman, was additionally motivating, she says. “I wanted to take them all down. There’s no cash prize, so it’s all about competing—earning the title—and having a good time.”

1. Make course selection easier. I know ROSI is being replaced – hooray for that! – but I feel obliged to vent years of frustration. ROSI’s interface is clunky and its inability to handle huge numbers of students is a handicap. If technology is meant to facilitate course selection, then why does the idea of applying for courses in person seem better? The new system can’t come online fast enough!

2. Eliminate the “course rush.” Students pay a lot to attend university for a year – and many live in fear of not being able to enrol in the courses they want to. Who wants to spend an extra semester at university because a required course was unavailable? The short, frenzied time frame for course-selection reminds me of those scenes from disaster movies when a state of emergency is declared and families trample over each other to get that last loaf of bread from the supermarket.

3. Increase funding for the Varsity. During my four years at U of T, the Varsity reduced its frequency from twice to once weekly. Most issues now contain articles about general topics, as opposed to specific news items. This limits the Varsity’s potential to be a valid news source for the U of T student. More money would solve the problem. Or, since most students live highly digital lives, perhaps the answer is to eliminate the paper edition altogether and devote all those resources to distributing news online. It would make the paper far more relevant and useful.

4. Why leave it to outside forces to feed the Robarts masses? Surely, U of T catering services could perfect the food truck burger, or poutine, or even chop suey! Not only would this guarantee that students would not be the victim of food poisoning, but it would also create more jobs for more students! Or, even better, food trucks would start accepting T-Cards with meal plans on them as payment, which would reduce the number of unused meals for students; because, really, who wants to trek from Gerstein Library all the way back to Burwash Hall at Victoria College for a lacklustre sloppy joe? You could have the crappy joe right there in front of the library! And why not just improve the quality of food in general? I mean, sure, it will probably be more expensive; but come on! A better fed student is a happier student.

5. Better wi-fi. This is a no-brainer, but it’s incredibly important. Students use the Internet constantly – for study and play. U of T should invest in faster wi-fi service that is accessible everywhere on all three campuses. And while they’re at it, simplify the log-in process as well!

6. Better school apparel. Sweatshirts are fine, but blazers and better ties (the current ones are about as wide as the side of a house) would give U of T students a more professional, academic look, which certain students (okay, me) feel is missing.

7. Increase staff in Admissions and Awards. Let’s face it, having to apply for OSAP and then wait for god knows how long while two or three people process your request is a pain – especially since most people go to the building during September when it’s way too nice out to be waiting in line. It doesn’t help that it kind of feels like you’re waiting in line for a soup kitchen. I remember having to wait an hour in the old Awards and Admissions building just to ask one simple question. And the thing is, you can’t really do this online! I mean, when was the last time an online FAQ really answered a really specific question of yours when it came to borrowing money from the government? Maybe they could create an online chat service like some banks do.

8. Turn King’s College Circle into a pond. Okay, I know what you’re thinking – this is some serious G20 stuff here. But hear me out! No one except for the engineering soccer team – and the occasional protester – uses that big patch of grass in King’s College Circle…. Let’s get rid of it! Let’s dig some of it out, fill it with water, and surround it with wild plants and grasses. And we’ll have rowboat rentals! How incredible would that be? And the protesters can still protest! Except on boats! And best of all, landscape architecture students can look after it as an extra course credit!

Add your own ideas in the comment box below

There were no outward signs at all that Deutsch’s body was harbouring a cardiovascular time bomb.

But last October at his annual checkup, Deutsch’s family doctor heard a subtle whooshing sound in his chest and recommended he see a vascular surgeon. That specialist ordered an ultrasound, the imaging technique that uses high-frequency sound waves to visualize soft tissue and internal organs. The results were concerning enough to lead a week later to 3-D magnetic resonance imaging, an advanced type of MRI that creates detailed digital three-dimensional images using a combination of magnetic field and radio waves. Results confirmed that Deutsch’s left carotid artery, which supplies blood to the head, had a dangerous buildup of plaque that was threatening to rupture and lodge in his brain. In early December, Deutsch underwent a carotid endarterectomy, a surgical procedure to scrape out the plaque. “It was a damn good thing we went in when we did,” the surgeon later told Deutsch’s family. “He was a week or two away from a stroke.”

Deutsch, who is 63 and back to his regular routine, is now part of a U of T–affiliated study at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre that is using the latest imaging techniques to track his right carotid artery for changes. “Since I had none of the symptoms you would expect with artery disease, I’m proof positive that medical imaging works,” he says.

Medical imaging has come a long way from the basic X-ray technique, invented more than a century ago, which showed only bones and foreign objects lodged inside the body. Today’s imaging systems employ a variety of 3-D and digital technologies that can give detailed pictures of the inner workings of the body that previously couldn’t be seen without cutting the patient open. This has led to quicker diagnoses of disease, earlier interventions, better-targeted therapies and less invasive surgeries. “What’s guiding us today is no longer the X-ray film on the light box but the computers in the operating room,” says Dr. Mark Henkelman, a U of T professor of medical biophysics and a world-renowned imaging researcher. “Canada, especially Ontario, has had a disproportionately high involvement on the international scene in imaging research and development.” And U of T–affiliated researchers are having a particularly strong impact in the fields of cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

***

We used to think of blood vessels as merely the passive pipes of the body, much like a house’s plumbing system. It was believed that when the pipes became thick, thereby narrowing or even blocking the passageway, blood couldn’t get through and a heart attack or stroke could result. Conventional imaging techniques such as angiograms, which are X-rays of blood vessels, can show this narrowing. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Alan Moody, the newly appointed department chair of medical imaging at U of T. Sometimes patients whose angiograms look completely normal can have heart attacks and strokes. Other patients may show a narrowing, such as a 50 or 80 per cent blockage, but never have a cardiac event. “It suggested we were looking at the wrong thing,” says Moody, who is also radiologist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

The new focus, Moody says, is no longer just the degree of narrowing, but the type of plaque in the vessel wall itself. “Blood vessels are very active organs,” he says, “and the vessel walls themselves can become diseased.” Plaques, made up of substances such as cholesterol, fats or sugars, can grow into the vessel wall. Like mini-tumours, they develop their own little complicated system of fragile blood vessels. These are prone to leaking blood, causing inflammation and rupturing. So even if the vessel isn’t narrowed and the blood flow remains normal, the dislodged plaque can cause a blood clot that may move to a blood vessel near the heart or brain and cause a heart attack or stroke.

Moody helped develop an advanced type of MRI that uses high spatial resolution, multiple planes and a large number of images to visualize such a hemorrhage in a blood vessel wall. Called 3-D MRIPH, which stands for three-dimensional magnetic resonance of intraplaque hemorrhage, it shows the problem area as a bright white “hot spot” that jumps out from the grayscale image. “And with 3-D, we get a slab of imaging we can look at in any plane,” Moody says.

The technique is non-invasive and takes only slightly longer than a regular MRI. For instance, it can produce images from the aorta up to the brain, on both sides, in eight minutes. If disease is present, there are three possible therapies to lower the risk of a heart attack or stroke. Surgery can remove the plaque; a metal or plastic stent can support the artery; and intensive drug therapy, such as statins, can reduce inflammation.

Every clinical case investigated for carotid disease that goes through Sunnybrook now receives the imaging. But Moody says, “There’s evidence that there’s a whole tidal wave of people who could benefit from this.” One of Moody’s research studies includes diabetics, many of whom have had traditional ultrasounds that misleadingly show only minimal carotid disease, while the new MRIPH technology is revealing much more. “We’re already seeing really complicated disease in patients with no symptoms,” he says.

***

Radiation therapy is a proven treatment for many types of cancer, used on about half of all cancer patients. But targeting the tumour while sparing the normal tissue around it has always been a huge technical challenge. “For a long time, methods to localize radiation were pretty crude and produced toxicity in healthy tissues, which prevented us from treating some tumours,” says Dr. David Jaffray, a medical physicist, and professor and vice-chair in U of T’s department of radiation oncology. Areas of the body to receive radiation were traditionally marked on the patient’s skin, which ignored subtle changes that might be happening to the patient internally, both to the healthy tissue and to the tumour itself as the treatment proceeds. For instance, a bladder may fill, a lung inflate, a small bowel shift or a tumour alter, creating a moving target for the treatment.

Jaffray attacked this problem by integrating computerized tomography (CT) imaging into radiation therapy to give a more precise real-time picture. His technique, called cone-beam CT, uses cone-shaped beams to produce a more accurate picture of where the tumour is immediately before and during treatment. So the system, which emits radiation beams, at the same time is acquiring radiographs of the patient and feeding them into a computer. The generated images then determine how to precisely align the radiation beam for the most effective treatment for that patient for that particular day.

A treatment unit equipped with cone-beam CT is about 20 per cent more expensive than regular CT, but it delivers more precise X-ray radiation to the patient. “We’ve seen a reduction in toxicity with image-guided techniques,” Jaffray says. “We’re also hitting more targets that we wouldn’t have otherwise, like prostate, lung and spinal cancers.” First used on a patient in Canada in 2003, cone-beam CT is fast becoming standard, with more than 1,000 machines now in use worldwide. Jaffray’s team is also in the process of building a $15-million research project that integrates state-of-the-art MRI and radiation therapy technology with a robotic system that moves the patient, to increase precision even more.

Jaffray says that in the near future, we’ll see imaging techniques that will further personalize cancer medicine. His team is using a wide array of imaging technologies to measure the delivery of drugs and monitor how a cancer may change with therapy. For instance, if on the first day of treatment a tumour is short of oxygen – which makes it resistant to radiation – will it stay that way? “We’re cracking open the old-style treatment, which was the same for everybody, and looking at, ‘what is the best thing to do for this patient?’” Jaffray says. “The frontier is exciting.”

***

Alzheimer’s disease can be tricky to diagnose in the early stages, since many other conditions – low thyroid, depression, Lyme disease, vitamin B deficiency or a stroke – can cause symptoms such as memory loss and concentration problems that mimic those of early Alzheimer’s. In a patient exhibiting signs of dementia, a conventional CT scan or MRI can show if the brain has atrophied and shrunk, which may suggest a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. But there’s a problem with that, says Dr. Paul Fraser, a U of T professor of medical biophysics and the Jeno Diener Chair in Neurodegenerative Diseases. “By the time a brain is losing tissue, it’s difficult to do much about it,” he says, adding that current drug therapies at that point can only temporarily slow the progression, at best. “So a lot of the push is to get early detection, to pick up people before nerve cells start to die.”

The disease may begin 10, 20 or even 40 years before a patient comes in with symptoms. Scientists believe that a protein called tau accumulates in the brain, and is involved in the death of nerve cells and the shrinkage of brain tissue. But long before that happens, it’s thought that fragments of another protein called amyloid start accumulating and forming plaques between nerve cells instead of being cleared out, as in a healthy brain. Amyloid may be linked to the formation of tau. So if we could see when someone’s brain is accumulating too much amyloid, we might be able to intervene before irreversible damage happens.

“The most important new development is that we can now do amyloid imaging,” says Dr. Sandra Black, the Brill Chair in Neurology in U of T’s department of medicine. Multimodal technology, which uses several different imaging techniques together, not only creates a pictorial map of the brain but can look at brain functioning, such as the way the brain accumulates amyloid or takes up glucose, the cells’ fuel. Functional MRIs follow blood flow to measure brain activity. SPECT, which stands for single photon emission computerized tomography, is a nuclear medicine technique that involves injecting the patient with a radiotracer that emits gamma rays, producing 3-D images.

Amyloid buildup alone doesn’t signify the presence of Alzheimer’s dementia, as 30 per cent of people with the biomarker don’t show any cognitive loss. But Black explains, “We can now say the person [with amyloid buildup] has Alzheimer’s pathology and may be at risk of getting dementia.” She’s also looking at the interaction between vascular disease – disease of the brain’s blood vessels – and Alzheimer’s. “The commonest cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s and vascular disease together,” she says.

As research director of the brain sciences program at Sunnybrook Research Institute, Black is leading a Canada-wide amyloid imaging project in people with Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral small-vessel disease. Black shares her findings with her patients. “We show them the images of their brain, and that’s often an incentive for patients to make changes,” she says. Many are motivated to get their cholesterol or diabetes under control, quit smoking, stop drinking to excess and start exercising. “A minimum of half an hour of aerobic exercise three times a week has shown to be brain-protective,” she says.

There may also be drug therapies available soon. The Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, a research collective, is following 7,000 patients a year in five U of T–affiliated hospitals that have memory clinics. “There have been a number of anti-amyloid therapies with thousands of patients in clinical trials, but it’s thought they haven’t worked because they’ve been started too late,” says Dr. Barry Greenberg, the alliance’s director of strategy and the director of neuroscience drug discovery and development at University Health Network. The therapies need to start sooner, he says, and that can happen now that imaging is able to pick up signs of Alzheimer’s much earlier than before. “Some drugs may be on the shelf already and others are in development, so there’s reason for optimism.”

Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) of Aurora, Ont., is an award-winning magazine journalist in health issues.

1895
X-ray (also called radiography). Uses electromagnetic radiation that various tissues absorb at different rates depending on their density and composition, so bones appear white, organs gray, air-filled lungs black. Used for fractures, obstructions, lung ailments, dental cavities, mammograms, angiograms, bone density tests and, in the form of radiotherapy, to attack cancers.

1960s
Ultrasound (sonography). Bounces high-frequency sound waves off tissue to create real-time video of organs, blood vessels, joints and a growing fetus. Uses no radiation.

1970s
CT scan or CAT scan (Computer Axial Tomography). Processes X-rays taken from various angles in a computer to create cross-sectional “slices” in 2-D or 3-D. Used for internal injuries, blood clots, tumours and in the brain.

PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography). A nuclear medicine technique that involves injecting patients with a radiotracer. Detectors then capture the radioactive gamma rays emitted. Depicts metabolic irregularities to diagnose heart disease and cancers. SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) is a less expensive alternative.

1980s
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Uses a large magnetic tube to temporarily “line up” water particles in the body, then reads signals produced by radio waves against those particles to create 2-D or 3-D images. Uses no radiation. Can show structure and function of many areas, including the spinal cord and brain.

Today
Medical imaging, which now uses digital technology instead of film, is becoming increasingly high-resolution, precise and fast. Clinicians may use two or more techniques for diagnosing or treating a condition. “Now there are almost no major diseases where you don’t do imaging first,” says Mark Henkelman, a professor of medical biophysics, and one of the world’s top imaging experts.

Valente calls Frye “the Maestro” to this day, 21 years after his death. She says he inspired her to make culture – and especially literature – the centre of her varied post–U of T career. Over the years, she has arranged literary readings, art exhibits and academic conferences – and translated several of Frye’s works into Italian. The latter endeavour she undertook purely out of love for his writing, she says, since for translation, “you get paid enough to buy a pair of stockings.”

Valente was not alone in being inspired by Frye. He was one of those teachers who often altered the direction of individual students’ lives. The longtime English professor (one of U of T’s longest serving) overcame his natural shyness sufficiently to give Margaret Atwood some personal advice when she earned her BA in 1961 – “deflecting” her, she said recently, from her “bohemian plans” to run away to Europe. “He knew of my writerly ambitions, and gave it as his opinion that I would probably get more writing done at Harvard than by drudging away as a waitress in Paris or London, while drinking absinthe and smoking myself to death.”

The advice gives a sense of how deeply Frye valued what the academy had to offer: discipline for the mind and fodder for the creative soul.

Certainly, he himself always flourished in academe – both as a student at U of T and at Oxford University during the Depression, and then as a professor. While teaching at U of T’s Victoria College from 1939 to near his death in 1991, he published many books and scholarly articles about the literary greats, modern and antique, parsing the likes of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Baldassare Castiglione, T.S. Eliot and William Blake. He didn’t limit himself to a particular period, national literature or genre – he grandly took the whole of literature as his subject.

As if wrestling with the giants wasn’t enough, he also sought to reform the whole project of literary criticism, wanting to turn it into a quasi-scientific discipline. For this, he was called – sometimes reverently, sometimes not – the Einstein of criticism. His 1957 work, Anatomy of Criticism, sought to show how every story ever told could be fit into four essential moulds. Further, the book analyzed literature in light of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work with archetypes, arguing that certain common symbols and figures populate all of literature, from folktales and ancient myths to contemporary novels.

It sounds, perhaps, to the general-interest reader like difficult stuff – and it is – but Frye’s writing is at least not opaque. He made a religion of clarity and turned out lucid, stylish sentence after lucid, stylish sentence. The complexity was always in the thought, not the prose. “In a way that some academics are not, Frye was a writer,” says University Professor Emeritus Edward Chamberlin, a former grad student of Frye’s. Valente agrees: “I had to try to live up to his beautiful sentences when I was translating them.”

Perhaps partly on the strength of its eminently readable style, Anatomy sold well immediately, and for two decades became an inescapable text for English students, assigned by professors at universities around the world. Frye’s influence reached its height in 1978, when only Plato, Marx, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lenin, Freud and Roland Barthes were more frequently cited by fellow academics. They even used an adjective – “Frygian” – to describe arguments inspired by him or young scholars following his lead.

During the postmodernist wave that began to wash over North America in the 1980s, though, Anatomy fell out of style, and many hip, young literature profs took it off their reading lists. But, by then, the never-still Frye had moved on to the project that would absorb his last decade: showing how the Bible was the bedrock on which all Western literature sits.

While his international reputation rose and fell, his standing on campus remained relatively constant. For most of the last four decades (of the five) he taught at U of T, he was considered an intellectual beacon for the university – one of the profs (with his contemporary Marshall McLuhan) who’d put U of T on the global radar.

By all accounts, he wasn’t a dramatic lecturer, but he could pack a lot of thought efficiently into a short time. “He’d leave the room, and there’d be a stunned hush, and then everyone would burst out chattering, bowled over at how much was covered,” recalls former student Jean O’Grady (BA 1964 Victoria, PhD 1978). She’s spent much of the last two decades as the associate editor of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye – the last of the 30 volumes is being released, appropriately enough, this year, the centenary of his birth.

The director of U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar, is also a former student – and one of those organizing a conference at U of T this fall to mark Frye’s centenary. He remembers taking a course on the Bible with Frye in the 1980s: “He’d just sit up there lecturing away, not looking much at his notes: totally, effortlessly coherent. Meanwhile, we’d be flipping madly through our Bibles, as he jumped all over. When I thought about becoming a professor, it was never with the thought that I could become him. He was just way beyond.”

Frye’s biographer John Ayre writes of how groups of students regaled each other with Frye anecdotes at Murray’s, a cheap-and-cheerful student hangout of the 1950s. “What did God say today?” was a common question.

“Some of his students may have called him God,” Chamberlin says. “I never did, though. He was a vast person, yes, but he was still very much a person.”

***

His divinity also wasn’t evident to his schoolmates in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and then Moncton, New Brunswick – where his family moved after the failure of his father’s hardware business. Some of his classmates bullied the weedy, piano-playing youngster, with his easily damaged, wire-rimmed spectacles and his thatch of unruly blond hair reaching for the sky. (His vertical hair would become, in due course, something of a campus landmark.)

Later, the adult Frye would remember his boyish self, envying the physique that the giant Samson showed off in the illustrated Bible stories his staunchly Methodist mother read him. In addition to the failure of the family business, the tragedy that overshadowed Frye’s upbringing was the death in the First World War of his much older brother, Howard. His mother often made it clear to the living boy that he was not, would never be, a patch on the dearly departed. (And, toward the end of her life, when her mind went, she’d address him by her dead son’s name.)

Still, despite her occasional belittling, the boy Northrop had grand dreams for himself: a composer, a novelist – writing a cycle of books to set beside the leather-bound Sir Walter Scotts on the shelf. His prescient high school nickname: Professor.

Frye’s ticket out of Moncton – and toward that nickname – came, oddly enough, through his prodigious ability to type. With his piano-strengthened fingers, he shone in a typing class at Moncton’s Success Business College (where he went after high school). The college sent him to Toronto, twice, to compete in one of the Jazz Age rages, a typing competition – held each time in Massey Hall. Before the second trip, he secured admission to Victoria College. Frye competed desultorily in the type-a-thon, and then stayed to begin his life’s work. He won whatever scholarships were necessary to take him through Vic (undergrad nickname: Buttercup, due to his hair colour), and then went on to Oxford, where the writer C.S. Lewis was, once, his examiner.

It was at Vic that he met his wife-to-be, Helen Kemp, another arts student. He was doing the lighting on a student production of The Gondoliers, and she was offstage giving line prompts. She was an artist’s daughter, and as such had an entree into the Toronto cultural scene that Frye wanted desperately to join. She was also a great devotee of the piano – and could play every bit as well as he. Their letters when they were separated for long periods – when he studied literature at Oxford, or she art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London – reveal a relationship that was equal parts heart and mind. In one impassioned note, Frye wrote: “Every time I think of seeing you again my stomach feels as if it had electric wires in it.”

He’d later dedicate his magnum opus – 1957’s Anatomy of Criticism – to her (in Latin: HELENAE UXORI) and once commented, after her death, that he hoped to make his next book one worthy of “Helen and God” – in that order. After reviewing their warm and witty correspondence, one of the country’s leading Frye enthusiasts, journalist Robert Fulford wrote: “Frye was that rare creature, a prodigy whose promise was entirely fulfilled. … This came about through the love of a woman both good and wise, as in many old-fashioned tales.”

Still, they shared a regret: they never bore any children together. She conceived once, but it was before they were married and settled, and they decided to arrange an abortion. She likely become pregnant a second time, but it is not clear what happened – only that she didn’t have the child.

***

The outward facts of Frye’s life, his interactions with others, however painful or pleasant, can ultimately explain but little about him. His friends, former students and colleagues, report that there was always something fugitive – something untouched and untouchable – about the man. “There was a part of him that was entirely his own, that was fundamentally solitary,” says Robert Denham, a Frye scholar and professor emeritus of English at Roanoke College in Virginia and the editor of several volumes of Frye’s Collected Works. What, then, of the life of his beautiful, cloistered mind?

Like many great and clear thinkers, Frye was fond of walking – he couldn’t drive, instead taking the subway to work at U of T. Once (as a student) he walked the whole of Bloor Street in a day; after he was married and living uptown, he’d often pace, with Helen or not, up and down St. Clair Ave.

The thoughts travelled in two basic streams on his early walks – followed by a third in later ones. First, he engaged his intellect with the Western tradition’s most challenging, canonical writers, especially those with a religious bent. His career really began with the book that put him on the literary criticism map: Fearful Symmetry, an analysis of William Blake’s difficult prophetic poems, published in 1947 by Princeton University Press. The American publishing house’s acceptance was a coup for a then-obscure young academic from Canada. Books on Milton and Eliot would follow, and he’d produce dozens more in the course of his life. Essentially, Frye saw literature as soluble: with enough hard work, you could figure out what it meant – or a range of plausible meanings.

Second, he ambitiously developed a system for categorizing every story ever written or told, from cowboy westerns to whodunits, from futuristic sci-fi back to the myths of primitive societies, from comedies of manners to the bloodiest war fiction. “He wasn’t someone who only paid attention to high literature,” Chamberlin says. “He’d love to take a break to read a detective novel over a beer in a pub. If you mentioned one you’d read, he’d soon have bought it and read through it.” He also liked crosswords, often polishing off one from The Times during a quiet half hour in Vic’s senior common room.

In the keynote address at last year’s Frye Festival in Moncton, Atwood adeptly, and somewhat jokily, described the basic schema set out in Anatomy of Criticism: “[There are] four main types of story: the romance, in which the hero journeys on a quest, kills dragons and rescues maidens; the comedy, in which the hero and the maiden can’t get together due to interference by censorious old fogies, but which, after complication, ends with marriage; the tragedy, in which the protagonist falls from a height and ends up dead or in exile; and irony, in which old fogies sit round a winter fire in a frozen world and tell tales.”

Frye’s schema, and his discussion of Jungian archetypes, bowled over the academic and general reading world upon Anatomy’s release in 1957. Many felt, as essayist Angus Fletcher had suggested, that Frye’s work had done what Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris had: opened up large boulevards through old, formerly clogged neighborhoods. For two decades, the book held sway and by the time Valente arrived at U of T from Italy in the late 1970s, Frye was considered by many the world’s foremost literary scholar.

***

Then, in the 1980s, came the postmodern deluge – the first wave of deconstructionists, semioticians and post-structuralists. For the latter, Frye’s structure was exactly what they were seeking to put behind them. Frye’s carefully worked out categories, and subcategories, were increasingly derided as the “pigeonholes” of an overly anal mind; in the identity politics era, his engagement with the canon, the writings of all those dead white males, appeared retrograde. The miscellaneous thinkers lumped together under the banner of postmodernism dismissed Frye’s belief that literature’s meaning could be ascertained with some certainty – to them, words on the page were blank “signifiers” with absolutely no connection to the “signified” (the meaning).

Although Frye made some salty comments in his ever-present notebooks about the onslaught of deconstructionists (“[there is] a sentence from Julia Kristeva [that] I can no more understand than I could eat a lobster with its shell on”), he didn’t express many public worries about his falling stock. Instead, he continued to shift gears, working on what would become his third intellectual contribution: showing how the Bible’s stories underlay all of Western literature. He produced 1982’s The Great Code – which made an original contribution both to biblical and literary scholarship. His notebooks also reveal a genuine interest in Buddhism and Islam – he had particular time for religions where God takes on human form. Most of the books and articles he turned out in the ’80s tended to work this same religion-meets-literature vein.

This then was the third and final stream of his thought – one he undertook while his beloved and once pin-sharp Helen fell prey to the too-slow goodbye of Alzheimer’s, passing away at last in 1986. He married again two years later, and worked until his death in 1991. In a sense, this scripture-centered work returned him full circle to those beautifully illustrated Bible stories his mother read to him when he was little. He hadn’t become a physical Samson in the interim, but his mental powers were formidable.

***

A tall, symmetrical stone house – the quintessential Upper Canadian farmhouse – sits near Christie Lake in West Flamborough, a rustic village not far from Hamilton, Ontario. Its occupant Alvin Lee was a longtime English professor at McMaster and then its president. Over the last two decades, Lee has shepherded – with Jean O’Grady’s able assistance – the posthumous publication of Frye’s Collected Works in 30 volumes.

“Frye was never one to sit in his university roost,” Lee says, over coffee. “He got involved in secondary education – working on high school texts. He sat on the CRTC. He spoke to school groups, did interviews. He was engaged politically.” Indeed, he (and Helen) actively supported abortion rights and championed the precursor to the NDP. Unlike many literary bookworms, he had a nose and enthusiasm for politics – and a dislike of anti-democratic extremes. He disagreed hotly with those in his circle who expressed either fascist or communist sympathies in the Depression-polarized 1930s.

Frye was an early promoter of Canadian literature, dutifully doing a roundup of each year’s poetry offerings in the 1950s, when it was still popular to disdain or ignore all local writing. As a poetry reviewer, he once got himself in trouble by declaring: “One can get as tired of buttocks in [Irving] Layton as of buttercups in the Canadian Poetry Magazine.” This provoked the irrepressible Montreal poet to conduct a long public campaign against Frye.

In the decade or so before he died, Frye had the satisfaction of seeing CanLit grow from a field occupied by aesthetically minded amateurs to one filled with professional writers, most notably his former student Atwood. In his quiet, detached way, he was something of a patriot – and several times turned down lucrative job offers from leading American universities.

***

Frye once wrote: “I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me.” It is, to a certain extent, true. A scholar’s life is notoriously hard to mark with clear external signposts. But in amongst the umpteen reverie-filled walks, there were certain high moments.

In the 1974-75 school year, Frye landed one of the academic world’s bulliest pulpits, the Norton Professorship at Harvard University – other recipients have included Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein, Jorge Luis Borges and e.e. cummings. He is reported to have impressed his audiences over the course of several packed lectures and overstuffed classes – they applauded at his first lecture when he drew his then-famous diagram of literature on the blackboard. A student newspaper joked: “His was the first oversubscribed Bible course since the 7th century.”

There were, of course, the honorary doctorates – 38 in total. And the shy man must have been secretly pleased by the rowdy pageantry that greeted his appointment as principal of Victoria College in 1959, with students exuberantly throwing toilet-paper rolls around an all-college meeting in celebration, and one carrying a placard saying, “The Truth Shall Make You Frye” – altering the words carved on Old Vic.

Frye once said a critic’s role was to play John the Baptist to the extraordinary writer’s Jesus. To herald the greatness of another – it is a role with some dignity to it, but it also requires some selflessness.

Although he was generally humble before the works he identified as great or worthy of notice, he was not, in the end, unduly modest about his critical abilities. One day, when Denham was going through Frye’s files, he came across a single piece of paper. On it was typed: “Statement for the Day of My Death.” Below, it read: “The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars…than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.”

Will the centenary of his birth help return Frye to his once central role in literary criticism? Will posterity agree that he had genius? Chamberlin hopes so. “Reputations go up and down – that’s what they do. But I think it will rest over the long haul on his writing about texts – the extraordinary, enlivening insights he has on the books he turns to. He was first and last a reader.”

At the end of her Canadian adventure, following several years as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto, Valente gave everyone in her professional circle a bookmark to remember her by. On it she had printed some words from Frye – ones she says she’s lived by. The bookmark read: “The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

Alec Scott (LLB 1994) splits his time between Toronto and San Francisco. He writes frequently about the arts and travel.

Watch an interview with Northrop Frye, from 1973

But for a long time, there was one conspicuous no-show. Every year, Arnold would invite Frye’s former student Margaret Atwood (BA 1961 Victoria); every year, a polite refusal. In 2010, Arnold found herself next to the renowned author at a security checkpoint at Pearson Airport, both of them getting their hands swabbed for bomb residue. Arnold seized her opportunity, swiftly introducing herself and pressing her cause. Atwood was a good sport about being buttonholed: “I should never be allowed out in public,” she later joked – and accepted the invitation to deliver last year’s keynote address, serving up an irreverent talk about the brainy professor’s impact on her and his other students.

This year’s Frye Festival will run from April 23 to 29, and, in honour of the scholar’s centenary, the festival has commissioned a life-sized bronze sculpture of Frye scheduled to be unveiled on what would be his 100th birthday, this Bastille Day.

In October, Frye’s alma mater, Victoria College, will host its own international conference to mark the centenary, with themes ranging from “Canadian Literature in a Post-National Age” to “The Survival of the Literary Imagination in the Digital Age.” University Professor Emeritus Edward Chamberlin will be among the speakers. “Frye’s basic message – that the imagination shapes reality – continues to be relevant,” Chamberlin says. “We still live through our stories.”

“If I don’t rip them up and toss them into the trash, the cleaners fish them out and put them back on my desk.… I’m constantly pulling out books and having symbolic bonfires. It amazes me sometimes that I have so little regard for them.”

Those he doesn’t destroy he keeps in one of his three libraries: one at home (which includes a collection of classical music scores) and two at his university offices. Those are enough.

“When I was young and doing research for my book on Blake [Fearful Symmetry], I found most of the books on him were junk – with maybe two exceptions. The problem isn’t how to get hold of information; it’s how to get rid of it. But I guess if I was a proper scholar I would visit [libraries] more often.”

Although his books are neatly arranged on shelves throughout his North Toronto home, he doesn’t really believe in the clichéd ideal of the gentleman’s library. “Mine is always changing, depending on what I’m interested in. I usually arrange my books by topic – some philosophy here, biography there and so on. The Bible materials are downstairs, and my own books upstairs.”

Curiously, while books such as The Educated Imagination are here in his office (translated into Japanese), his own biography is not. “It’s one thing I don’t have a copy of,” says Frye.

As a product of a strict Methodist upbringing, Frye says his reading habits were more a matter of course than design. “There wasn’t much else you were allowed to do on Sundays,” he says. He was reading by age three, and fluently by six. The result was he found much of public school boring, having read most of the books already. Comic books were part of his early library along with “lots of trash” from the Boy’s Own series. “They seemed to concentrate almost exclusively on caning and floggings rendered in gruesome detail.”

Does he have many books on his “must read” list? “Oh yes, but the one nice thought about growing old is that you know you’ll never have time.”

How common is a sight like this in the universe? Are there millions of Earths orbiting distant stars, or are the circumstances that conspire to make life possible so complex and improbable that ours is the only habitable planet in the cosmos?

Despite the discovery of hundreds of new worlds, scientists have yet to observe even one truly Earth-like planet. The planets they are finding, meanwhile, are forcing them to rethink how solar systems form and are bringing them closer to answering the question, “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?”

The pace of discovery has been breathtaking.

In 1991, scientists had discovered exactly zero planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Ten years later, they had found 62 such extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets.” By the end of 2011, that number had climbed to 716, with thousands of other candidates under investigation.

In some ways, this flurry of discovery makes the Earth seem commonplace – planets abound in our galaxy. But the variety and oddity of so many exoplanets suggests that Earth might be anything but typical. It also hints that our solar system might have a stranger past than people once thought.

“Our view of planet formation is being turned on its head,” says Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics. “It must be a much more dynamic process than previously thought, one that ends up hurling planets around, leaving them far from where they formed.” Jayawardhana is the Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics and the author of Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System (HarperCollins Canada, 2011). He was part of a Toronto team that in 2008 captured the first direct image of an exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

Jayawardhana is one of many U of T–based planet hunters. Researchers in the astronomy department, the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) are all caught up in one of the most exciting explorations in physical science.

Quinn Konopacky, a post-doctoral fellow at U of T’s Dunlap Institute recalls the thrill of planetary discovery when she was doing a previous post-doc at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In 2009, she was part of a team examining images of a star in the constellation Pegasus. This star was already known to have three gas giants sweeping around it. New images, though, revealed an additional “blob” closer to the star.

“I was very excited about the new planet candidate, but we had to make sure it showed up again to be certain it was real,” she says. In 2010, the object reappeared in images from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Calculations showed that it was indeed a fourth planet. The team realized that, with four giant planets in wide orbits, the system was analogous to a scaled-up version of our own solar system. “This was pretty profound,” says Konopacky. “I don’t know of any other planetary systems that have such similarities to our own.”

Astronomers are now searching for new models to describe what is out there. “The big story is the incredible diversity of worlds,” says Jayawardhana. “It really does seem that nature is much more prolific and wondrous than our imagination – by a wide margin.”

Until recently, theories of planetary genesis were necessarily based on our own relatively orderly solar system, where large planets orbit far from the sun, smaller rocky planets circle in closer, all planets travel in the same direction in nearly perfect circles and their paths fall almost in one plane.

Now astronomers have found exoplanets smaller than Earth, many times larger than Jupiter and all sizes in between. Some planets orbit in one direction while their star spins in another. Some follow oval-shaped paths, swooping in close to their stars and then flying back out into cold, distant regions. Still others orbit at strange angles, far out of alignment with the original dust disks. Each new surprise changes theories of planetary system architecture, and also raises new questions about how common life-supporting planets might be.

Another big surprise has been a multitude of huge gaseous planets that orbit much closer to their stars than anything in our own system. These so-called “hot Jupiters” speak to new theories of chaotic and complicated planetary evolution.

“The observers love it because they’re making the theorists look like fools,” says CITA director Norman Murray. “When you see these discoveries, you say, ‘How could this happen? Everything we know is wrong.’”

In actuality, theorists such as Murray had predicted some of these phenomena. But the flood of new information is changing the established story.
It’s widely believed that every planetary system begins with a cloud of gas measuring light years in diameter. Over millions of years, the cloud spins and compresses under its own gravity and momentum into a whirling disk of material with a central bulge. The centre collapses into a star, while the rest of the disk provides raw material for planets.

What happens next is a matter of debate.

One long-standing but still contested theory suggests that dust particles in the cloud stick together, gradually accreting into pebbles, boulders and larger bodies called “planetesimals.” Eventually, they become massive enough that their gravity starts attracting even more material. Ultimately, these objects become protoplanets and then full-fledged planets.

There are problems with this “core accretion” theory, though. The forces that bind tiny particles together are different from those that hold a planet together. Theorists can’t fully explain how objects make the jump from chemically bound to gravitationally bound bodies. Also, core accretion is slow. It could take millions of years to grow a gas giant this way, but the stellar disks out of which planets form don’t last nearly that long.

A second theory involves “disk instability.” This theory suggests that turbulence in the dust cloud creates globs of matter that simply collapse into planets under their own gravity.

Neither theory is completely accepted, nor are they mutually exclusive. There is some evidence that smaller planets may form via core accretion, and giants via disk instability. Recent discoveries now show that, however planets first come together, their origin story doesn’t end there. “It’s not as though all these systems form the same way,” says Murray. “The hot Jupiter systems didn’t form the same way as other systems.”

Hot Jupiters are mysterious because a star and large planet that form so close to one another should theoretically fuse into a single object. This has led to new theories suggesting that planets may be much more mobile than previously thought.

A hot Jupiter may form far from its star, “migrating” over time, sweeping up gas and other planetary bodies, growing larger and larger as it edges closer to its system’s centre. The migration theory, though, can’t explain yet another surprising type of exoplanet – smaller gas giants known as “hot Neptunes.” If hot Neptunes migrated toward their stars the way scientists’ models project, they should have picked up more material along the way and ended up much larger.

In addition to gradual processes such as migration, astronomers now think more dramatic forces may also be at play in planetary system formation. Some strange architectures may result from planets crashing into one another, objects whipping planetary neighbours into new orbits and other volatile behaviour that researchers are only beginning to contemplate. Each new system seems to demand new explanations.

As varied as planetary systems have turned out to be, planets themselves have become indisputably common. In fact, it is possible that every star has planets. “Before 1996, you could have argued that planetary systems might be very rare, but today we know that planet and star formation work hand in hand,” says James Graham, director of the Dunlap Institute.

Graham is a project scientist for the Gemini Planet Imager, a cutting-edge camera that relies on a technology called “adaptive optics” to compensate for image distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. When the Imager sees first light in early 2013, it will be able to pick out a planet that is one ten-millionth as bright as its companion star.

Direct imaging is just one planet-detection method; most planets are identified via indirect measurements only. For example, if a star periodically dims, it can indicate that a planet is “transiting” in front of it. A planet’s gravity can also create a telltale wobble in the motion of its star.

Despite these and other detection methods, an authoritative planetary census still faces technological limitations. In general, larger planets in younger systems are easier to detect. Direct observation works best for planets far out from their stars, while many other methods are only practical for planets in tight orbits. Small Earth-like planets are often a major challenge.

Step by step, though, new tools reveal an ever-greater diversity of planets, orbits and systems. One of the major quests in the field is to find Earth-sized planets orbiting their stars at a “Goldilocks” distance, where it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. Such planets would be the most likely candidates for finding extraterrestrial life.

In addition to ground-based observatories, planet hunters also have access to tools such as NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which has a mission to find planets similar to our own.

Kepler reveals variations in light intensity for thousands of stars. A single dip could have many causes, so researchers look for at least three periodic indicators before they draw publishable conclusions about the existence of a planet.

Because Kepler scientists monitor Earth-like orbits, three dips takes about three years. Kepler launched in 2009, so many people expect major announcements this year or next.

“I’ve heard people connected to Kepler hint that there are Earth-sized planets in Earth-sized orbits,” says Murray. “It hasn’t been announced yet, but I suspect they know.”

Even with current limitations, there exists an astounding depth of information about exoplanets. Scientists can calculate their diameter, orbital distance and, in some cases, whether a planet is rocky or gaseous. They can measure temperature, atmospheric composition and other surprising details. They can provide weather reports for planets hundreds of light years distant – a hot Jupiter forecast might call for temperatures in the high 700s with winds gusting up to 9,000 km/h.

Of course, not all exoplanets have such extreme environments. And with so much new information, researchers are getting closer to answering a fundamental question: Is there life on other planets?

Murray cautions that the apparent abundance of planets doesn’t necessarily mean life abounds in the universe. “There are probably a lot of stars with Earth-like planets – on average there could be at least one per star,” he says. “But astronomers and biologists lack imagination. We don’t understand how life can form without liquid water and carbon.” Many other conditions may also be necessary for life and we still don’t know exactly how precise and rare they might be. Consider the other “Earth-like” planet in our own solar system. Venus is similar in size and composition to our world, but minor differences make it completely inhospitable to life as we know it. (Mars, with a mass about one-tenth of our planet, is arguably too small to qualify as “Earth-like.”)

Still, Murray says, even if only one in 10 or one in 100 stars have planets suitable for life, “That’s still a lot of stars.” (Astronomers estimate there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone.)

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, may help scientists detect the building blocks of life – oxygen, ozone, water and carbon dioxide – on extrasolar planets. But researchers caution that there are still a lot of challenges to overcome to fully understand these new worlds. “We’re just at the beginning,” says Konopacky.

The existence of exoplanets went from questionable to commonplace in the space of two decades. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could happen just as suddenly – it is more likely than ever that our blue marble will turn out to be merely one of dozens spinning through the firmament. “That dramatic moment is no longer a remote possibility,” says Jayawardhana. “It may well occur in our lifetime, if not during the next decade.”

Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based journalist and author, specializing in science, technology, research and culture.

Far from the star: The 1RXS 1609 system is as different as can be from Kepler-11: the system’s star has a planet eight times the size of Jupiter with an orbital radius of about 50 billion kilometres – about 330 times that of Earth. Scientists struggle to explain how a planet that size could form at that distance, leading to theories that it might have been flung to the outer reaches through interactions with other bodies in the system.

Make mine a double: In a classic scene from the movie Star Wars, two suns set over the desert planet of Tatooine. It’s no desert planet, but scientists have located a cold gaseous world about 200 light years from Earth that orbits a pair of stars. If life existed in the inhospitable world of the Kepler-16 system, it would be treated to just such a double sunset.

Water world: Though oceans cover about 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface, they make up less than one per cent of the Earth’s total mass. In contrast, liquid water may account for three-quarters of the mass of planet GJ 1214b. One model suggests that the planet is ocean from pole to pole. This “Super-Earth” is only about 2.5 times the diameter of our world, and planets this size or smaller are prime suspects in the search for extraterrestrial life.