Closing gaps to our origins. The UV window into the Universe
Abstract
The investigation of the emergence of life is a major endeavour of science. Astronomy is contributing to it in three fundamental manners: (1) by measuring the chemical enrichment of the Universe, (2) by investigating planet formation and searching for exoplanets with signatures of life and, (3) by determining the abundance of aminoacids and the chemical routes to aminoacid and protein growth in astronomical bodies. This proposal deals with the first two. In the Voyage to 2050, the world-wide scientific community is getting equipped with large facilities for the investigation of the emergence of life in the Universe (i.e. VLT, JWST, ELT, GMT, TMT, ALMA, FAST, VLA, ATHENA, SKA) including the ESA's CHEOPS, PLATO and ARIEL missions. This white paper is a community effort to call for the development of a large ultraviolet optical observatory to gather fundamental data for this investigation that will not be accessible through other ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. A versatile space observatory with UV sensitivity a factor of 50-100 greater than existing facilities will revolutionize our understanding of the pathway to life in the Universe.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1911.00769,
title = {Closing gaps to our origins. The UV window into the Universe},
author = {Ana I. Gomez de Castro and Martin A. Barstow and Fréderic Baudin and Stefano Benetti and Jean Claude Bouret and Noah Brosch and Domitilla de Martino and Giulio del Zanna and Chris Evans and Miriam García and Boris Gaensicke and Carolina Kehrig and Jon Lapington and Alain Lecavelier des Etangs and Giampiero Naletto and Yael Nazé and Coralie Neiner and Jonathan Nichols and Marina Orio and Isabella Pagano and Gregor Rauw and Steven Shore and Gagik Tovmasian and Asif ud-Doula and Kevin France and Lynne Hillenbrand},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.00769},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
White Paper submitted to the European Space Agency call for Voyage 2050. This WP proposes the development of a European Ultraviolet Visible Observatory (EUVO) to study the origins of life and it is largely based in arXiv 1306.3358 (ApSS,354,229)