Related papers: The Detectability of Earth's Biosignatures Across …
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Terrestrial extrasolar planets around low-mass stars are prime targets when searching for atmospheric biosignatures with current and near-future telescopes. The habitable-zone Super-Earth LHS 1140 b could hold a hydrogen-dominated…
Exoplanetary science is on the verge of an unprecedented revolution. The thousands of exoplanets discovered over the past decade have most recently been supplemented by discoveries of potentially habitable planets around nearby low-mass…
The varied surfaces and atmospheres of planets make them interesting places to live, explore, and study from afar. Unfortunately, the great distance to exoplanets makes it impossible to resolve their disk with current or near-term…
Should we expect most habitable planets to share the Earth's marbled appearance? For a planetary surface to boast extensive areas of both land and water, a delicate balance must be struck between the volume of water it retains and the…
Recognizing whether a planet can support life is a primary goal of future exoplanet spectral characterization missions, but past research on habitability assessment has largely ignored the vastly different conditions that have existed in…
The high reflection of land vegetation in the near-infrared, the vegetation red edge (VRE), is often cited as a spectral biosignature for surface vegetation on exoplanets. The VRE is only a few percent change in reflectivity for a…
The origin of life and the detection of alien life have historically been treated as separate scientific research problems. However, they are not strictly independent. Here, we discuss the need for a better integration of the sciences of…
We have developed a characterization of the geological evolution of the Earths atmosphere and surface in order to model the observable spectra of an Earth-like planet through its geological history. These calculations are designed to guide…
The search for an inhabited planet, other than our own, is a driver of planetary exploration in our solar system and beyond. Using information from our own planet to inform search strategies allows for a targeted search. It is, however,…
Knowledge of a star's evolutionary history combined with estimates of planet occurrence rates allows one to infer its relative quality as a location in the search for biosignatures, and to quantify this intuition using long-term…
The search for extrasolar planets has already detected rocky planets and several planetary candidates with minimum masses that are consistent with rocky planets in the habitable zone of their host stars. A low-resolution spectrum in the…
Direct imaging is likely the best way to characterize the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. Previously, Stark et al. (2014, 2015, 2016) estimated the Earth twin yield of future direct imaging…
The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…
Exoplanet atmosphere characterization has seen revolutionary advances over the last few years, providing us with unique insights into atmospheric chemistry, dynamics and planet formation mechanisms. However, true solar system analog planets…
When an exoplanet passes behind its host star, we can measure the time of the occultation, its depth, and its color. In this chapter we describe how these observables can be used to deduce physical characteristics of the planet such as its…
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…
Visible and near-infrared spectra of transiting hot Jupiter planets have recently been observed, revealing some of the atmospheric constituents of their atmospheres. In the near future, it is probable that primary and secondary eclipse…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
We review the thermal history of the Universe. We obtain a new estimate for the thermal history of the Earth over the past four billion years using a biological thermometer based on (1) a rough estimate of the absolute time calibration of…