Related papers: Life Beyond the Solar System: Remotely Detectable …
The search for signatures of life beyond Earth has been a major goal of space research and astrobiology for decades. The combination of expanded knowledge on Solar System bodies from past missions and advancements in in-situ detection…
Exoplanet characterization missions planned for the future will soon enable searches for life beyond our solar system. Critical to the search will be the development of life detection strategies that can search for biosignatures while…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
Some of the most exciting and promising areas of Astronomy research today are found at the boundaries of the discipline: the search for Exoplanets and Multi-Messenger Astronomy. In order to achieve breakthroughs in these research fields…
The search for life on planets outside our solar system will use spectroscopic identification of atmospheric biosignatures. The most robust remotely-detectable potential biosignature is considered to be the detection of oxygen (O_2) or…
We address three major questions in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets and cosmology. To achieve this goal, two requirements are needed. First a very large aperture to…
Future remote sensing of exoplanets will be enhanced by a thorough investigation of our solar system Ice Giants (Neptune-size planets). What can the configuration of the magnetic field tell us (remotely) about the interior, and what…
The search for life beyond the Solar System remains a primary goal of current and near-future missions, including NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). However, research into determining the habitability of terrestrial…
Understanding how giant and terrestrial planets form and evolve, what is their internal structure and that of their atmosphere, represents one of the major challenges of modern astronomy, which is directly connected to the ultimate search…
Transmission and eclipse spectroscopy have been invaluable tools for the characterisation of extrasolar planet atmospheres. While they will continue to provide many new insights and discoveries in the decade(s) to come, these methods are…
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…
Some atmospheric gases have been proposed as counter indicators to the presence of life on an exoplanet if remotely detectable at sufficient abundance (i.e., antibiosignatures), informing the search for biosignatures and potentially…
Lightning is an important electrical phenomenon, known to exist in several Solar System planets. It carries information on convection and cloud formation, and may be important for pre-biotic chemistry. Exoplanets and brown dwarfs have been…
Exoplanetary science is a very active field of astronomy nowadays, with questions still opened such as how planetary systems form and evolve (occurrence, process), why such a diversity of exoplanets is observed (mass, radius, orbital…
This Resource Letter gives an introduction to the main topics in exoplanet research. It is intended to serve as a guide to the field for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students, both theoretical and experimental, and for workers…
What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number…
Radio wavelength observations of solar system bodies reveal unique information about them, as they probe to regions inaccessible by nearly all other remote sensing techniques and wavelengths. As such, the SKA will be an important telescope…
The discovery of an increasing number of Jupiter-like planets in orbit around other stars (or extra-solar planets) is a promising first step toward the search for Life in the Universe. We review all aspects of the question: - definition of…
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…
The field of exoplanetary science has emerged over the past two decades, rising up alongside traditional solar system planetary science. Both fields focus on understanding the processes which form and sculpt planets through time, yet there…