Related papers: Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Framework for Their Ass…
In the coming years and decades, advanced space- and ground-based observatories will allow an unprecedented opportunity to probe the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable exoplanets for signatures of life. Life on Earth, through…
Exoplanet science promises a continued rapid accumulation of new observations in the near future, energizing a drive to understand and interpret the forthcoming wealth of data to identify signs of life beyond our Solar System. The large…
The search for life beyond the solar system is a central goal in exoplanetary science. Exoplanet surveys are increasingly detecting potentially habitable exoplanets and large telescopes in space and on ground are aiming to detect possible…
Upcoming biosignature searches focus on indirect indicators to infer the presence of life on other worlds. Aside from just signaling the presence of life, however, some biosignatures can contain information about the state that a planet's…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
Here we review how environmental context can be used to interpret whether O2 is a biosignature in extrasolar planetary observations. This paper builds on the overview of current biosignature research discussed in Schwieterman et al. (2017),…
We use a probability theory framework to discuss the search for biosignatures. This perspective allows us to analyse the potential for different biosignatures to provide convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life and to formalise…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
Biosignature gas detection is one of the ultimate future goals for exoplanet atmosphere studies. We have created a framework for linking biosignature gas detectability to biomass estimates, including atmospheric photochemistry and…
The ultimate goal of astrobiology is to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word "biosignature" suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating a particular process…
The search for a second instance of life is one of the greatest problems of modern science. Outside of creating an artificial origin of life on Earth, the primary targets for the search for life are planets inside or outside the solar…
In the next decades, the astrobiological community will debate whether the first observations of oxygen in an exoplanet$'$s atmosphere signifies life, so it is critical to establish procedures now for collection and interpretation of such…
A wide variety of scenarios for the origin of life have been proposed, with many influencing the prevalence and distribution of biosignatures across exoplanet populations. This relationship suggests these scenarios can be tested by…
We review the field of exoplanetary biosignatures with a main focus upon atmospheric gas-phase species. Due to the paucity of data in Earth-like planetary atmospheres a common approach is to extrapolate knowledge from the Solar System and…
Exoplanet hunting efforts have revealed the prevalence of exotic worlds with diverse properties, including Earth-sized bodies, which has fueled our endeavor to search for life beyond the Solar System. Accumulating experiences in…
The discovery of inhabited exoplanets hinges on identifying biosignature gases. JWST can reveal biosignature gases, though current discoveries have yet to evidence life. The central challenge is attribution: how can we confidently identify…
Thousands of planets beyond our solar system have been discovered to date, dozens of which are rocky in composition and are orbiting within the circumstellar habitable zone of their host star. The next frontier in life detection beyond our…
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…
The near-term capability to characterize terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres may bring us closer to discovering alien life through atmospheric data. However, remotely detectable candidate biosignature gases are subject to false positive…
Here we advocate an observational strategy to help prioritize exoplanet observations. It starts with more easily obtained observational data, and ranks exoplanets for more difficult follow-up observations based on the likelihood of avoiding…