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The universe is not is. It appears.

The sun and stars appear to rise in the east and set in the west.

The constellations and solar system appear to rotate around the earth,

tracing lines of stardust across the night sky.

But this isn't the truth or rather the full truth.

Sarah Fina El-Bauderinans has dedicated her career to investigating the illusions and truths of the universe.

It's what she does as a PhD candidate studying astrophysics

and it's one of the things she writes about in her new memoir, Starstruck.

Our eyes can't possibly reveal the truth

that we're on a rock hurtling through space at 30 kilometers per second

and that our cosmic neighborhood, our solar system, is in fact orbiting the center of our galaxy.

Throughout her book, Sarah Fina marries this quest to explore the universe,

to expand human knowledge with the personal, with the quest to understand her human condition.

We view the worlds and our place within it through the lens of our lived experiences,

our own struggles and dreams.

But it is in this messy place of complexity that we have a chance of learning something fundamental and true.

We just have to be brave enough to question our perceptions.

But she had to put this journey on hold for a bit.

Right before grad school, Sarah Fina tested positive for a mutated bracket gene

that predicts a very likely cancer diagnosis in the future.

In this personal quest to understand what I call the universe within myself,

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