Related papers: The Detectability of Earth's Biosignatures Across …
The key goals of the astrobiology community are to identify environments beyond Earth that may be habitable, and to search for signs of life in those environments. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of habitable environments…
In a famous paper, Sagan et al.(1993) analyzed a spectrum of the Earth taken by the Galileo probe, searching for signatures of life. They concluded that the large amount of O2 and the simultaneous presence of CH4 traces are strongly…
In this study, we treat Earth as an exoplanet and investigate our home planet by means of a potential future mid-infrared (MIR) space mission called the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). We combine thermal spectra from an…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
Since the Archean, N2 has been a major atmospheric constituent in Earth's atmosphere. Nitrogen is an essential element in the building blocks of life, therefore the geobiological nitrogen cycle is a fundamental factor in the long term…
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…
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…
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed…
An important goal within the quest for detecting an Earth-like extrasolar planet, will be to identify atmospheric gaseous bio-signatures. Observations of the light transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere, as for an extrasolar planet,…
The search for Earth-like extrasolar planets is in part motivated by the potential detection of spectroscopic biomarkers. Spectroscopic biomarkers are spectral features that are either consistent with life, indicative of habitability, or…
Super-Earths, a class of planetary bodies with masses ranging from a few Earth-masses to slightly smaller than Uranus, have recently found a special place in the exoplanetary science. Being slightly larger than a typical terrestrial planet,…
The search for technosignatures from the Galaxy or the nearby universe raises two main questions: What are the possible characteristics of technosignatures? and How can future searches be optimized to enhance the probability of detection?…
Of the 342 planets discovered so far orbiting other stars, 58 "transit" the stellar disk, meaning that they can be detected by a periodic decrease in the starlight flux. The light from the star passes through the atmosphere of the planet,…
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…
Rocky planets are common around other stars, but their atmospheric properties remain largely unconstrained. Thanks to a wealth of recent planet discoveries and upcoming advances in observing capability, we are poised to characterize the…
We speculate on some novel consequences possibly associated with a change of elementary particle constants with time. These concern the question as to whether particles reaching the earth from distant parts of the universe reflect their…
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the highly incomplete sampling of the technosignature search space is often considered as a plausible explanation for the persistent lack of detections over six decades of searches. If…
Spectral characterization of Super-Earth atmospheres for planets orbiting in the Habitable Zone of M-dwarf stars is a key focus in exoplanet science. A central challenge is to understand and predict the expected spectral signals of…
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…
Planetary surface habitability has so far been considered, in the main, upon a global scale. The increasing number of 3D modelling studies of (exo)planetary climate has highlighted the need for a more nuanced understanding of surface…