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Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of low-mass stars undergo strong tidal effects that modify their spin states. These planets are expected to host dense atmospheres that can also play an important role in the spin evolution. On one…
The oxidation of rocky planet surfaces and atmospheres, which arises from the twin forces of stellar nucleosynthesis and gravitational differentiation, is a universal process of key importance to habitability and exoplanet biosignature…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
The search for habitable conditions and signs of life on exoplanets is a major frontier in modern astronomy. Detecting atmospheric signatures of Earth-like exoplanets is challenging due to their small sizes and relatively thin atmospheres.…
We show that collision-induced absorption allows molecular hydrogen to act as an incondensible greenhouse gas, and that bars or tens of bars of primordial H2-He mixtures can maintain surface temperatures above the freezing point of water…
Titan's abundant lakes and seas exchange methane vapor and energy with the atmosphere via a process generally known as air-sea interaction. This turbulent exchange process is investigated with an atmospheric mesoscale model coupled to a…
Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
The diversity of planetary systems that have been discovered are revealing the plethora of possible architectures, providing insights into planet formation and evolution. They also increase our understanding of system parameters that may…
Bacteria populate the colon where they replicate and migrate in response to nutrient availability. Here I model the colon bacterial population as a sandpile model, the colon-pile. Sand addition mimics bacterial replication and grains…
We show that terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs older than $\sim$ 1 Gyr could have been in runaway greenhouses for several hundred Myr following their formation due to the star's extended pre-main sequence phase,…
The results obtained in these experiments have revealed a remarkable resistance of extremophilic bacteria and archaea against different radiation sources (VUV, solar wind simulants, X rays) whenever protected by microsized carbonaceus…
A key challenge in origin-of-life studies is understanding the environmental conditions on early Earth under which abiogenesis occurred. While some constraints do exist (e.g., zircon evidence for surface liquid water), relatively few…
Recent findings suggest Mars may have been a clement environment for the emergence of life, and may even have compared favorably to Earth in this regard. These findings have revived interest in the hypothesis that prebiotically important…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
With the discovery of rocky planets in the temperate habitable zone (HZ) of the close-by cool star TRAPPIST-1 the question of whether such planets could harbour life arises. Habitable planets around red dwarf stars can orbit in radiation…
Little is known about the early evolution of Venus and a potential habitable period during the first one billion years. In particular, it remains unclear whether or not plate tectonics and an active carbonate-silicate cycle were present. In…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
The presence of a liquid solvent is widely regarded as an essential prerequisite for habitability. We investigate the conditions under which worlds outside the habitable zones of stars are capable of supporting liquid solvents on their…