In the astronomy community, there’s a distinction between an observer, who collects data, and a theorist, who speculates about what that information means. Bean is classified as an observer, and he owns the label, though he’s a little uncomfortable with its implications. “The observers, you’re not allowed to be wrong at all, ever,” he says. “But the theorists, all you have to do is be right once.” He claims this in jest, but it clearly bothers him. Bean admits that he has a huge chip on his shoulder: “I’m convinced that most people who are successful in science are driven by that. They have something to prove to themselves and to everyone else because it takes so much persistence to do this.”

You can trace this scrappiness to his upbringing in Chatsworth, a small city in northeast Georgia. “I like to say it’s so rural that I have a hard time saying ‘rural,’ ” he quips. Bean’s parents both taught middle school science and math and often took their only child out to look at the night sky through a telescope. “I wasn’t one of those kids that was very precocious and said, ‘I’m going to do astronomy research.’ I just remember being cold as the dickens.”

Instead, Bean’s childhood excursions encouraged a lifelong interest in the outdoors. His family took trips to Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. “Most people where I grew up, outdoor stuff to them meant going hunting,” he says. Bean was a Boy Scout well into high school, where he excelled at math. He was accepted into the Governor’s Honors Program, a six-week residential summer program for gifted students. “There were kids from all over the state,” Bean recalls. “The smartest kids were only there because they didn’t get into the MIT summer program. They were so much more knowledgeable about math than I was. Honestly, if you asked people who knew me when I was growing up, they would probably use the word ‘genius’ for me, which is completely insane. I was a smart kid, but they had no idea what a real genius was.”

He went to Georgia Tech intending to be an aerospace engineer, but he grew disillusioned with the field during a summer internship at Raytheon. He didn’t like the idea of being beholden to a big company, and he found the work boring. He wanted to do something more creative and was determined to ask bigger questions. “At the time, the big questions in astrophysics were focused on cosmology, which is the origin and evolution of our entire universe,” he says. “You can’t ask a bigger question than that. And I wanted to be more in control of my own destiny. Academia could offer me a chance to be my own boss sooner rather than later in life, and that was really important. I didn’t want to be a cog in a wheel. I wanted to be the wheel itself.”

It would take a long time before Bean would become a wheel, or even a spoke or a hubcap. He applied to numerous doctoral programs and was rejected from all but one, at the University of Texas at Austin. When he arrived there, Bean already knew he was going to focus on exoplanets. In 2002, his senior year in college, he attended an American Astronomical Society conference and saw presentations on extrasolar planets. “In Star Trek, they were always traveling to different planets,” he says. “I was like, Holy cow, in astronomy, you can find planets around other stars and study them? And somehow it hit me.”

At UT Austin, Bean was confronted with an astrophysics faculty that, frankly, thought he was a dud. “In my candidacy examination, the main person in the department pretty much told everybody I was never going to amount to anything and everybody was just wasting their time with me.” He characterizes himself as a “so-so” grad student who was constantly banging his head against the wall. The problem was that Bean had immediately sought to do the impossible.

Bean showed that because astrophysicists had been misreading host star signals, the planets they thought they had observed didn’t actually exist. Between 2008 and 2010, he wrote a number of papers proving people wrong.

In exoplanet study, stars are crucial because they can tell us about the planets orbiting them. Bean’s dissertation was on the metallicity of M dwarf stars, essentially the smallest stars in the universe. Metallicity refers to the proportion of an object’s elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium, a measurement that is easy to conduct on sun-like stars. But since M dwarfs are so cold, the atoms in their atmospheres combine to form molecules, making them much more difficult to understand. Bean boldly thought he could be the person to parse this issue, but he underestimated how much data he’d get back — “a forest of a mess” of it, he says. “Decoding that is basically impossible, but I tried.”

Bean was nearly done for when an opportunity arose from an unlikely place. Toward the end of his doctoral program, Bean heard from his adviser, who had made a planet discovery with a team that no longer wanted to work together. He passed the initial findings on to Bean, who then wrote the software — writing software is a big part of being an astronomer — to finish the work. The program Bean created applied the radial velocity method, a popular strategy for exoplanet detection based on the movement of the star a planet orbits. (Astrophysicists rarely detect planets through direct imaging; the telescope is usually trained on a star, and the planet is identified by observing the motion around its host.)

When it came to postdoc work, Bean was, once again, turned down by every program but one: the Institute for Astrophysics in Göttingen, Germany. That’s where he met Seifahrt, an astronomical instrument builder who’d recently completed a doctorate at the European Southern Observatory near Munich. While there, Seifahrt worked on an instrument that more precisely measured the signals of planets around M dwarf stars. Bean and Seifahrt immediately saw how their interests, research, and dispositions were similar, and the observer and instrument builder knew they’d make a formidable team.

Bean and Seifahrt set out to create a calibration system for the ESO telescope. Their device conducted radial velocity measurements in the spectrum of a planet called the near infrared, something astronomers hadn’t thought possible. With this innovation, Bean and Seifahrt made their first real breakthrough, not by detecting new planets, but rather by showing that because astrophysicists had been misreading host star signals, the planets they thought they had observed didn’t actually exist. Between 2008 and 2010, Bean wrote a number of papers proving people wrong. While he debunked just two planets, it was a big deal at a time when few exoplanets had been discovered. Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, published a story about how Bean and Seifahrt were killing other people’s planets.

“The establishment wasn’t so established at the time,” Bean says. “The exoplanet people in 2010 were outsiders already. And we were outside those people.”

You’d think that trash-talking the bogus planets of other astrophysicists would draw their ire, but it had the opposite effect. Suddenly major institutes wanted to work with Bean, in particular the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where the findings he challenged originated. “A key thing about exoplanets at the time is there were no instruments,” Bean says. “Most people were trying to use standard astronomy tools in a really weird way, and they saw me as this guy who’s figured out how to use this instrument that wasn’t supposed to do [exoplanets]. They loved it.”

In 2010, Bean started another postdoc fellowship at Harvard, studying the exoplanet he’s perhaps most famous for: GJ 1214b, a Neptune-like planet, whose host star is 48 light-years from the sun, that was first spotted in 2009. He was able to secure around 90 hours of observational time on the Hubble telescope to study this one exoplanet, venturing that it would serve as an archetype for Neptune-like planets. Even so, Bean and his team could find no trace of molecules in its atmosphere. From that intensive observation, though, they were able to establish that GJ 1214b has clouds extremely high in its atmosphere that don’t allow starlight to get through, making it impossible to ever figure out what molecules exist there, no matter how long and hard telescopes train on it. Bean calls it “the most famous flatline in astronomy.”

“It was spectacular observational work,” says Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. “It was a major advancement in saying, ‘What is the error bar? What is the sensitivity you can get from those sorts of observations?’ ” Bean and his team didn’t just expose a new kind of planet — they provided astrophysicists a new road map for how intensive observations need to be in order to draw a conclusion from them. Madhusudhan praises Bean’s observations as “art.”

Between his planet-killing papers and innovative instrument building, Bean was a promising catch for the University of Chicago, which sought enterprising postdocs to build an exoplanet group from scratch. And when Bean came to the school, he brought Seifahrt with him. They spent much of the 2010s working on the aforementioned MAROON-X, a planet detection device that’s now attached to the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

It was a prestigious appointment, but Bean nevertheless saw it as a continuation of a pattern of rejection. “People who’ve been in this career, they got into a bunch of grad schools and they picked one. They got a bunch of postdoc offers and they picked one. They get a bunch of faculty offers and they pick one. I applied for a number of jobs that year and interviewed at a few places, but the only place I got an offer was from UChicago.” I have to remind him: It’s not a bad offer.

Extraterrestrial life, if it’s out there somewhere, probably doesn’t look as you’d expect. It is almost certainly not, Bean stresses, an intelligent form — it won’t be little green men — but rather like those microbial bacteria that were the longest-existing life forms on Earth. “Intelligent life would be fascinating to discover, but astronomers are probably not the people who would do that,” he says. “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI [a nonprofit institute spun out of a NASA effort], they’re using radio telescopes to look and try to receive signals. That’s the shortcut to finding an unambiguous signal of intelligent life out there. Most astronomers are doing it in a more step-by-step way: Let’s find a planet that could have liquid water.” As Bean explains, all life on Earth needs two things: DNA and liquid water. And you can’t have DNA without liquid water. So if you’re searching for life somewhere else in the universe, liquid water is where you’d look.

Bean feels like astrophysicists are looking a little too purposefully and not hard enough. Madhusudhan, for example, made a monumental discovery in September when a team he led detected methane in the Neptune-like exoplanet K2-18b. Since oceans require methane in the atmosphere, Madhusudhan theorizes that such bodies of water might exist beneath the atmosphere of the planet.

Bean has a hard time stomaching Madhusudhan’s theory. Unless it’s empirically undeniable that there’s water on K2-18b, Bean isn’t willing to speculate. “I just don’t believe it,” he says. “Are his models wrong? No. Is he making bad assumptions? Perhaps. Or overinterpreting? Yes.”

Madhusudhan laughs after I read him this quote. “When he says he does not believe, that makes me smile. Because as scientists, we don’t believe, we just work with observational constraints. So you either use the constraints and make a cogent argument, or you don’t.”

Astronomy isn’t an adversarial field, and, as Madhusudhan points out, any heated arguments arise because of the epochal advances being made in astrophysics today. “This is the nature of the cutting edge,” he says. “When you have a cutting-edge observation, you have to realize this is the first time such observations have ever been possible in the history of humanity.”

Bean would be thrilled to be able to prove the existence of life on an exoplanet, but ever the realist, he’s dubious it will happen. “I wish I could fly, but I can’t,” he says. “It’s just the limitations of the technology that we have. We’re waiting another 20 years or so for the telescope that will really do this.”

Even so, for four years Bean taught a course at the U. of C. called the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Describing it, he launches into an extremely long and unwieldy explanation that encompasses the existence of liquid water on Mars, whether the impact of a large asteroid could launch molecules from one planet to another, and “water interacting with rock causing a disequilibrium chemistry that life could get energy from and exist.” I decide not to ask him if Close Encounters of the Third Kind could happen in real life.

His larger point is that the search for extraterrestrial life is a great crash course in learning about the cosmos: “There’s a lot of science that underlies the properties of planets, the objects in our solar system, understanding how we find and characterize exoplanets, and what the status of exoplanet science is.”

All of this speaks to a pattern in Bean’s work, a degree of rigor that’s nearly ruthless. He isn’t on a maniacal search for aliens — he’s simply a very disciplined and accomplished astrophysicist set on using evidence and reason to learn incrementally more about space. (“Precision, not accuracy” is a maxim he invokes often about his work.) Nothing is definitive in his mind unless all alternative scenarios have been disproved. In astrophysics, this is both Bean’s strength and his weakness. “Some people have seen things in their data recently that turned out to be real and were really interesting discoveries,” he says. “When I look at it, I’m like, ‘I would’ve never believed that.’ And that’s a problem for me because I need to keep an open mind.”

I ask Bean if he’s ever daunted by the scale of space, the innumerable planets beyond our galaxy. He mentions his romantic partner’s 12-year-old daughter. “She is more artistic, more creative, and it’s scary for her. For me, it’s just reduced down to equations and graphs and stuff like that. For her, she pictures this emptiness above her head. I can write down a set of equations on this blackboard that describes how the universe works: ‘That’s it, right?’ ”

Perhaps I should have considered my own fears of space before I spoke with Bean. After our meeting in his office, I spent the next few days anxious and agonized, constantly turning over the information I’d absorbed. “Did you know our atmosphere isn’t even the first one Earth had?” I asked a group of people at dinner out of nowhere. Suddenly I’d become an amateur astrophysicist, drunkenly unloading on an Uber driver: “Do you realize how improbable it is that you even exist? We are just a freak occurrence in nature!” Then I told him, haphazardly and loudly, how terrestrial planets (those like Earth or Mars that are made up mostly of silicate rocks or metals) aren’t even the most common type of planet in the known universe, as if I were playing Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective, without an aura of mystique, freakishly good looks, or a charming Southern accent.

Whatever confidence I had in my understanding of astrophysics after I left Bean’s office was dispelled when I sat in on his course at the U. of C. This winter quarter, he taught only one undergraduate course, simply titled Exoplanets. On the day I visited, a gray and wet morning in late January, the room was packed, four rows of tables shaped in a semicircle completely occupied by close to three dozen bleary-eyed undergrads. It was two days before the midterm exam, and Bean stressed that information from this lecture would be on the test. He spoke about something called gravitational microlensing, which he described as “the craziest exoplanet detection technique there is.”

I wish I could tell you what gravitational microlensing is, but I found it virtually impossible to comprehend. My notes say it involves a change in brightness and the dynamics of movement and light — but they also say: “Einstein radius, various measurements. I’m totally lost.” I have to assume the students were geniuses, especially the one I sat directly behind, who must absorb information through osmosis because he spent the entire class looking at sports gambling sites on his laptop.

After meeting with Bean, I spent the next few days constantly turning over the information I’d absorbed. Suddenly I’d become an amateur astrophysicist, drunkenly unloading on an Uber driver: “Do you realize how improbable it is that you even exist?”

Bean seems optimistic, and maybe even a bit threatened, by the new astrophysicists entering the field. “I have a postdoc who is a real whiz with computers,” Bean says. “He said AI has solved the protein-folding problem in biology. I barely understand how it works, but this is a real growth area in astronomy.”

Bean admits that he feels like an old man in the field (again, he’s 43): “My best creative years are probably behind me. My role now is, I think, much more about supporting the younger people in my group who come in with their ideas and helping them sharpen those ideas, flesh them out.”

This is in line with Bean’s current duties, which involve more management, and his preference for working collaboratively. He relishes overseeing large teams, like Webb’s Early Science Release Program, where he keeps projects on track, facilitates resources for other astrophysicists and researchers, and lobbies for observation time. “I would’ve thought scientific management is just pushing paper and making sure everyone gets paid,” he says. “But there’s a real reason why you have managers in these kinds of projects, to keep an eye on the science that ultimately you want to achieve. And to make decisions about what’s good enough, what problems are worth pursuing, what problems could be solvable, what problems are important, and what things are just a nuisance.”

Of maximum importance is trying to gather more information about exoplanet surfaces, a relatively new frontier. Recently, through Webb, astrophysicists have observed infrared light emitted from the surface of a terrestrial exoplanet, allowing scientists to detect its temperature — the first detection of light from an exoplanet resembling our own solar system’s rocky worlds. And they’ve detected the surface of a different terrestrial exoplanet with no atmosphere around it whatsoever. These are huge developments, simply because they further our knowledge of planetary evolution.

Bean and his team at the U. of C. are also studying rocky exoplanets that are colder than expected. His group is busy trying to figure out what it is about their atmospheres, or lack thereof, and surfaces that causes this. He returns to the elephant analogy: “I want to see all the animals on the savanna. It’s my personality to go more toward the sure thing and then also to spread out and try to see the whole picture.”

The first time I met Bean was at Movement, a gym in Lincoln Park. When I arrived at 11 a.m., Bean, who was outfitted in a climbing belt, a gray T-shirt, and black athletic shorts, had already been climbing for an hour.

The climbing walls at Movement can reach 56 feet. In a typical session, Bean will do 12 to 15 full climbs, starting with the most challenging and working his way down.

I watched as Bean pivoted and grabbed with ease, contorting his body into a pretzel, bending sideways, his legs at times forming a 90-degree angle. He moved with the backboneless fluidity of a centipede, going so high it nearly gave me a panic attack. But there was an efficiency and joylessness to his routine that made it feel like he was merely exercising, rather than doing the thing he claims to love more than anything outside of work. And this carried over to our discussions: Though they were thorough and wide-ranging, I’d always sensed Bean was holding something back.

But at the end of one long interview, I started to see him differently when I noticed a melancholic undertone to his voice. He was talking about Seifahrt, who left the U. of C. in January for a job at the National Science Foundation in Tucson, Arizona. “I met him 17 years ago,” Bean said. “This is closing a chapter in my life with him leaving.”

When I mention this to Seifahrt, he’s visibly touched. “I know a much more personable side to him,” he says. “He’s very straightforward about the things he’s passionate about.” I name them: It’s astrophysics and rock climbing. Then Seifahrt adds a third: “He’s also passionate about his kids.”

Bean was careful to avoid discussing his family in depth with me. But here’s what he would say: He’s divorced and has two children, ages 15 and 13. At the moment, he’s splitting his time between Hyde Park and near where his romantic partner, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, works. In our last conversation, Bean and I spoke over Zoom from his home there. After I turned the tape recorder off, I said that as a fellow father, I could relate to how hard being away from his children must be. He got choked up.

“Everything I do is for them,” he said. “It’s complicated. What you’re seeing is a persona I’m presenting. My family is not something I like to bring up. I’m conscious there’s another part of me that I’m not showing.”

Until that point, Bean came across as an X-Files character whose sweatless rock climbing, robotic approach to science, and encyclopedic knowledge of astrophysics signaled, perhaps, an extraterrestrial being in my midst. But now I find all of it — his exactitude, indefatigable work ethic, constant questioning, and protection of his family; his precision, not accuracy — to be deeply human.

The universe is overwhelmingly vast and fear inducing, but isn’t it incredible how much more of it there is to explore? If Bean or any other astrophysicist can discover extraterrestrial life, it won’t be the end of observing the cosmos. In the search for truth, the important thing is to never stop looking.