Related papers: The Search for Directed Intelligence
What is the chance we start a conversation with another civilization like our own? Our technological society produced signals that could be received by other extraterrestrial civilizations, within a sphere around us with a radius of $\sim…
A recently discovered group of nearby co-orbital objects is an attractive location for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to locate a probe to observe Earth while not being easily seen. These near-Earth objects provide an ideal way to…
Close-in extrasolar giant planets may be directly detectable by their reflected light, due to the proximity of the planet to the illuminating star. The spectrum of the system will contain a reflected light component that varies in amplitude…
Transit observations have found the majority of exoplanets to date. Spectroscopic observations of transits and eclipses are the most commonly used tool to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and will be used in the search for life. However,…
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence aims to find evidence of technosignatures, which can point toward the possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. Radio signals similar to those engineered on Earth may…
We present an application of an artificial neural network methodology to a modern wide-field sky survey Pan-STARRS1 in order to build a high-quality sample of disk galaxies visible in edge-on orientation. Such galaxies play an important…
We now know that the outer solar system is host to at least six diverse planetary ring systems, each of which is a scientifically compelling target with the potential to inform us about the evolution, history and even the internal structure…
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…
Context: TESS has been successfully launched and has begin data acquisition. To expedite the science that may be performed with the resulting data it is necessary to gain a good understanding of planetary yields. Given the observing…
Observing and controlling complex networks are of paramount interest for understanding complex physical, biological and technological systems. Recent studies have made important advances in identifying sensor or driver nodes, through which…
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 search for technosignatures--remotely detectable evidence of extraterrestrial technology--draws upon examples from the recent history of Earth as well as projections of Earth's technosphere. Facilities like the Habitable Worlds…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
We present the use of self-supervised learning to explore and exploit large unlabeled datasets. Focusing on 42 million galaxy images from the latest data release of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys, we…
The Gaia mission has observed over 2 billion stars repeatedly across the entire sky over 10 years, revealing the many astronomical objects that vary on human timescales from seconds to years. Its repeated astrometric, photometric,…
If a sufficiently advanced civilization can either modulate the emission from an X-ray binary, or make use of the natural high luminosity to power an artificial transmitter, these can serve as good beacons for interstellar communication…
High quality energy systems information is a crucial input to energy systems research, modeling, and decision-making. Unfortunately, actionable information about energy systems is often of limited availability, incomplete, or only…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…