Related papers: Enhanced interplanetary panspermia in the TRAPPIST…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is home to at least seven terrestrial planets and is a target of interest for future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations. Additionally, these planets will be of interest to future missions making…
The recent discovery of potentially habitable exoplanets around Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1 has attracted much attention due to their potential for hosting life. We delineate a simple model that accurately describes the evolution of…
The star TRAPPIST-1 hosts a system of seven transiting, terrestrial exoplanets apparently in a resonant chain, at least some of which are in or near the Habitable Zone. Many have examined the roles of tides in this system, as tidal…
TRAPPIST-1 (Gillon et al. 2017) is an extremely compact planetary system: seven earth-sized planets orbit at distances lower than 0.07 AU around one of the smallest M-dwarf known in the close neighborhood of the Sun (with a mass of less…
The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…
The very recent discovery of planets orbiting very low mass stars sheds light on these exotic objects. Planetary systems around low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are very different from our solar system: the planets are expected to be much…
Genomic complexity can be used as a clock with which the moment in which life originated can be measured. Some authors who have studied this problem have come to the conclusion that it is not possible that terrestrial life originated here…
The TRAPPIST-1 system offers the opportunity to characterize terrestrial, potentially habitable planets orbiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star. We performed a four-orbit reconnaissance with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard…
Multiple planet systems provide an ideal laboratory for probing exoplanet composition, formation history and potential habitability. For the TRAPPIST-1 planets, the planetary radii are well established from transits (Gillon et al., 2016,…
Transiting compact multi-planet systems provide many unique opportunities to characterize the planets, including studies of size distributions, mean densities, orbital dynamics, and atmospheric compositions. The relatively short orbital…
This paper considers the lithopanspermia hypothesis in star forming groups and clusters, where the chances of biological material spreading from one solar system to another is greatly enhanced (relative to the field) due to the close…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
Considering the possibility of complex organic molecules and microbial life appearing under the ice shell of those satellites in the Solar system, this study investigates the possible analog sources (targeting the potential ice satellite…
TRAPPIST-1 is a nearby ultra-cool dwarf star transited by seven rocky planets. We observed three transits of its outermost planet, TRAPPIST-1h, using the G141 grism of the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope to…
The high energy radiation environment around M dwarf stars strongly impacts the characteristics of close-in exoplanet atmospheres, but these wavelengths are difficult to observe due to geocoronal and interstellar contamination. On account…
We study the dynamical evolution of the TRAPPIST-1 system under the influence of orbital circularization through tidal interaction with the central star. We find that systems with parameters close to the observed one evolve into a state…
One of the most fundamental questions in exoplanetology is to determine whether a given planet is habitable. We estimate the relative likelihood of a planet's propensity towards habitability by considering key physical characteristics such…
Upcoming telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), or the Extremely Large Telescope (ELTs), may soon be able to characterize, through transmission, emission or reflection spectroscopy, the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets…
To assess the number of life-bearing worlds in astrophysical environments, it is necessary to take the intertwined processes of abiogenesis (birth), extinction (death), and transfer of life (migration) into account. We construct a…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is the first transiting planet system found orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star. At least seven planets similar to Earth in radius and in mass were previously found to transit this host star. Subsequently, TRAPPIST-1 was…