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As oxygen is essential for respiration and metabolism for multicellular organisms on Earth, its presence may be crucial for the development of a complex biosphere on other planets. And because life itself, through photosynthesis,…
Proxima Centauri b provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand the evolution and nature of terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarfs. Although Proxima Cen b orbits within its star's habitable zone, multiple plausible evolutionary paths…
The search for life on extrasolar planets is based on the assumption that one can screen extrasolar planets for habitability spectroscopically. The first space born instruments able to detect as well as characterize extrasolar planets,…
Current models indicate that Venus may have been habitable. Complex life may have evolved on the highly irradiated Venus, and transferred to Earth on asteroids. This model fits the pattern of pulses of highly developed life appearing,…
In this paper we discuss and illustrate the hypothesis that life substantially alters the state of a planetary environment and therefore, modifies the limits of the HZ as estimated for an uninhabited planet. This hypothesis lead to the…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
The current goals of the astrobiology community are focused on developing a framework for the detection of biosignatures, or evidence thereof, on objects inside and outside of our solar system. A fundamental aspect of understanding the…
Motivated by the recent discovery of interstellar objects passing through the solar system, and by recent developments in dynamical simulations, this paper reconsiders the likelihood for life bearing rocks to be transferred from one…
The solar system's terrestrial planets are thought to have accreted over millions of years out of a sea of smaller embryos and planetesimals. Because it is impossible to know the surface density profile for solids and size frequency…
We study the prospects for life on planets with subsurface oceans, and find that a wide range of planets can exist in diverse habitats with ice envelopes of moderate thickness. We quantify the energy sources available to these worlds, the…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
The data recently accumulated by the Kepler mission have demonstrated that small planets are quite common and that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-like planet within their Habitable Zone. These results are combined…
The concept of the Circumstellar Habitable Zone has served the scientific community well for some decades. It slips easily off the tongue, and it would be hard to replace. Recently, however, several workers have postulated types of…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We consider the habitability of the Universe throughout cosmic history, and conservatively restrict our attention to the context of "life as we know it" and…
This paper outlines a simple approach to evaluate habitability of terrestrial planets by assuming different types of planetary atmospheres and using corresponding model calculations. Our approach can be applied for current and future…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Warm rocky exoplanets within the habitable zone of Sun-like stars are favoured targets for current and future missions. Theory indicates these planets could be wet at formation and remain habitable long enough for life to develop. In this…
We combine a semi-analytic model of galaxy evolution with constraints on circumstellar habitable zones and the distribution of terrestrial planets to probe the suitability of galaxies of different mass and type to host habitable planets,…
This paper reviews our current understanding of terrestrial planets formation. The focus is on computer simulations of the dynamical aspects of the accretion process. Throughout the chapter, we combine the results of these theoretical…