Related papers: Light and Life: Exotic Photosynthesis in Binary St…
With upcoming missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), and the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL), we soon will be on the verge of detecting and…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…
We focus on the astrobiological effects of photospheric radiation produced by main-sequence stars of spectral types F, G, K, and M. The photospheric radiation is represented by using realistic spectra, taking into account millions or…
We point out some advantages of making observations of extrasolar planets in linearly polarized (LP) light. Older cool stars have quite low levels (~ 10^-4 to 10^-5) of fractional LP, while extrasolar planets can have relatively high…
In an attempt to select stars that can host planets with characteristics similar to our own, we selected seven solar-type stars known to host planets in the habitable zone and for which spectroscopic stellar parameters are available. For…
It is surprising to find dust around B type stars, as in the case of B[e] stars. These stars exhibit a dense, dusty environment witnessed by their infrared-excess and many emission lines from permitted and forbidden transitions. Given the…
Introduction: The search for life on distant exoplanets is expected to rely on atmospheric biosignatures detection, such as oxygen of biological origin. However, it is not demonstrated how much oxygenic photosynthesis, which on Earth…
It is shown that several habitability conditions (in fact, at least seven such conditions) appear to be fulfilled automatically by circumbinary planets of main-sequence stars (CBP-MS), whereas on Earth these conditions are fulfilled only by…
The majority of stars more massive than the Sun is found in binary or multiple star systems and many of them will interact during their evolution. Specific interactions, where progenitors and post-mass transfer (MT) systems are clearly…
We perform a quantitative assessment for the potential for photosynthesis in hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean. The photosynthetically active radiation in this case is from geothermal origin: the infrared thermal radiation emitted by hot…
Extrasolar planet host stars have been found to be enriched in key planet-building elements. These enrichments have the potential to drastically alter the composition of material available for terrestrial planet formation. Here we report on…
During the last decade, there was a paradigm-shift in order to consider terrestrial planets within liquid-water habitable zones (LW-HZ) around M stars, as suitable places for the emergence and evolution of life. Here we analyze the…
Binary star systems are assumed to be co-natal and coeval, thus to have identical chemical composition. In this work we aim to test the hypothesis that there is a connection between observed element abundance patterns and the formation of…
Spurred by the discovery of numerous exoplanets in multiple systems, binaries have become in recent years one of the main topics in planet formation research. Numerous studies have investigated to what extent the presence of a stellar…
Binary stars are dynamical systems formed by two stars that are physically bound by the gravitational force. Binary stars are privileged laboratories, allowing one to measure the fundamental properties of stars but also potentially changing…
Previous work on possible surface reflectance biosignatures for Earth-like planets has typically focused on analogues to spectral features produced by photosynthetic organisms on Earth, such as the vegetation red edge. Although oxygenic…
The discovery of Exoplanetary Systems has challenged some of the theories of planet formation, which assume unperturbed evolution of the host star and its planets. However, in star clusters the interactions with flyby stars and binaries may…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
Thousands of exoplanets orbit nearby stars, showcasing a remarkable diversity in mass, size, and orbits. With the James Webb Space Telescope now operational, we are observing exoplanet atmospheres and aiming to reach down to small,…
The study of extra-solar planetary systems has emerged as a new discipline of observational astronomy in the past few years with the discovery of a number of extra-solar planets. The properties of most of these extra-solar planets were not…