Related papers: The Next Great Exoplanet Hunt
The last 25 years have been revolutionary in astronomy, as the field of exoplanets has gone from no known planets outside the Solar System to thousands discovered over the last year few years. This represents a rapid increase not just in…
By the 2040s, the exoplanet field will have moved from the discovery of a few thousand planets to hundreds of thousands, thanks to Gaia DR5, TESS, PLATO, Roman, and their successors. At that stage, the key bottleneck will no longer be…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New…
The search for spectroscopic biosignatures with the next-generation of space telescopes could provide observational constraints on the abundance of exoplanets with signs of life. An extension of this spectroscopic characterization of…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
Gravitational waves have opened a new observational window through which some of the most exotic objects in the Universe, as well as some of the secrets of gravitation itself, can now be revealed. Among all these new discoveries, we…
An outstanding, multi-disciplinary goal of modern science is the study of the diversity of potentially Earth-like planets and the search for life in them. This goal requires a bold new generation of space telescopes, but even the most…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration recently published the first images of the supermassive black holes in the cores of the Messier 87 and Milky Way galaxies. These observations have provided a new means to study supermassive…
The James Webb Space Telescope was not even launched yet when the Astro2020 Decadal Survey American report recommended the development of what is now called the Habitable World Observatory, also mentioned by the Voyage 2050 European report.…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is arguably the most exciting development in astrophysics during the past 15 years, rivalled only by the detection of dark energy. Two projects unite the communities of exoplanet scientists and…
Within the next few years, the first Earth-mass planets will be discovered around other stars. Some of those worlds will certainly lie within the classical "habitable zone" of their parent stars, and we will quickly move from knowing of no…
Exoplanet observations promise one day to unveil the presence of extraterrestrial life. Atmospheric compounds in strong chemical disequilibrium would point to large-scale biological activity just as oxygen and methane do in the Earth's…
This chapter describes the prospects for detecting the first black holes in our Universe, with a specific focus on instruments/telescopes that will come online within the next decade, including e.g. the SKA, WFIRST, EUCLID, JWST, and large…
Ground-based telescopes have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the next decade and beyond. Extreme…
The Run 2 data taking period of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in years 2015-2018 has presented a great opportunity to search for physics beyond the standard model (BSM). It will be followed by the Run 3 period starting in 2022,…
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
We discuss the case for using the Next Generation Very Large Array both to discover new black hole X-ray binaries astrometrically, and to characterize them. We anticipate that the ngVLA will be able to find $\sim$100 new black hole X-ray…