Related papers: Scouting the spectrum for interstellar travellers
Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…
All water-covered rocky planets in the inner habitable zones of solar-type stars will inevitably experience a catastrophic runaway climate due to increasing stellar luminosity and limits to outgoing infrared radiation from wet greenhouse…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
For more than 60 years, the predominant SETI search paradigm has entailed the observation of stars in an effort to detect alien electromagnetic signals that deliberately target Earth. However, this strategy is fraught with challenges when…
This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…
Interstellar travel in the Milky Way is commonly thought to be a long and dangerous enterprise, but are all galaxies so hazardous? I introduce the concept of galactic traversability to address this question. Stellar populations are one…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
Usually, positions of spacecraft on interplanetary or deep space missions are determined by radar tracking from ground stations, a method by which uncertainty increases with distance from Earth. As an alternative, a spacecraft equipped with…
It has recently been suggested in this journal by Benford (2019) that "Lurkers" in the form of interstellar exploration probes could be present in the solar system. Similarly, extraterrestrial intelligence could send long-lived probes to…
The dust tails of comets similar to Hale-Bopp can scatter as much optical light as does the Earth. Space-based observatories such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder or Darwin that will detect extra-solar terrestrial planets also will be able…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
The speed of light in the global positioning system (GPS) is theoretically investigated through the analysis of navigation equations together with metric tensors for light speed constancy.
It is possible to learn a great deal about exoplanet atmospheres even when we cannot spatially resolve the planets from their host stars. In this chapter, we overview the basic techniques used to characterize transiting exoplanets -…
This paper highlights a methodological approach designed to enhance the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by hypothesizing that a transmission technosignature would likely have two features: 1) be wideband in the microwave or…
Are we alone? It is a compelling question that human beings have confronted for centuries. The search for extraterrestrial life is a broad range of quests for finding simple forms of life up to intelligent beings in the Universe. The…
The authors discuss potential remarkable achievements for pulsar science with the FAST (pulsar monitoring, timing and searching, as well as others related), and expect a FAST era of pulsar science to come.
The Galactic Plane was searched for transient, monochromatic light at optical and near-IR wavelengths to detect pulses shorter than 1 sec. An objective-prism Schmidt telescope and CMOS camera were used to observe 973 square degrees along…
We explore the possibility that the transit signature of an Earth-size planet can be detected in spectroscopic velocity shifts via the Rossiter effect. Under optimistic but not unrealistic conditions, it should be possible to detect a large…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
A conventional stroboscope uses flashes of light to make a rapidly moving object visible. This is achieved by throwing repetitive pulses of white light on the object of specific frequency. Here an alternative approach is given in which two…