Related papers: The Next Great Exoplanet Hunt

The next generation of gravitational-wave detectors, conceived to begin operations in the 2030s, will probe fundamental physics with exquisite sensitivity. These observations will measure the equation of state of dense nuclear matter in the…

The search of life in the Universe is a fundamental problem of astrobiology and a major priority for NASA. A key area of major progress since the NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015 (NAS15) has been a shift from the exoplanet discovery phase to…

Four ongoing microlensing experiments have produced important new results but also big puzzles, the major one being that the expected classes of lenses cannot account for the observed distribution of time scales. I discuss future…

For the last few decades the study of disks around stars young and old and of different types have progressed significantly. During the same time a completely new discipline, the study of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our…

The very-high-energy gamma-ray sky can be surveyed on a daily basis by particle-detector arrays at high (mountain) elevation. In the northern hemisphere the survey recently conducted by the HAWC gamma-ray observatory significantly enriched…

We report on coronagraphic observations of the nearest solar-type star, $\alpha$ Cen A, using the MIRI instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. With three epochs of observation (August 2024, February 2025, and April 2025), we achieve a…

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will transform our knowledge of the outer planets and their satellite systems; however the visibility of unique targets of opportunity with high scientific value will be reduced for northern objects.…

Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…

Direct observations of exoplanets probe the demographics and atmospheric composition of young self-luminous companions, yielding insight into their formation and early evolution history. In the near future, Gaia will reveal hundreds of…

The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world and is one of our greatest tools for discovering and studying radio pulsars. Over the last decade, the GBT has successfully found over 100 new…

The past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Beginning with the exploration of our solar system and continuing through the pioneering Explorers and Great Observatories of today, NASA missions have made…

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…

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA's next flagship science mission, follows in the tradition of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and other preceding great observatories. HWO will directly image and characterize Earth-like…

With more than 5500 detected exoplanets, the search for life is entering a new era. Using life on Earth as our guide, we look beyond green landscapes to expand our ability to detect signs of surface life on other worlds. While oxygenic…

In the next decades, ultra-high-energy neutrinos in the EeV energy range will be potentially detected by next-generation neutrino telescopes. Although their primary goals are to observe cosmogenic neutrinos and to gain insight into extreme…

In the near future we will have ground- and space-based telescopes that are designed to observe and characterize Earth-like planets. While attention is focused on exoplanets orbiting main sequence stars, more than 150 exoplanets have…

For centuries, humanity wondered if there were other worlds like ours in the Universe. For about a quarter of a century, we have known that planetary systems exist around other stars, and more than 3800 exoplanetary systems have been…

We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing observations. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, a, greater than ~1.5 R_E.…

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been the most impactful science-driven mission ever flown by NASA. However, when HST reaches the end of its life, there will be a void due to the loss of some of the science capabilities afforded by HST…

COROT will be the first high precision photometric satellite to be launched with the aim of detecting exoplanets by the transit method. In this paper, we present the simulations we have carried out in order to assess the detection…