Related papers: Cosmic Biology in Perspective
The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
The field of exoplanetary science is making rapid progress both in statistical studies of exoplanet properties as well as in individual characterization. As space missions provide an emerging picture of formation and evolution of…
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…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
Few scientific discoveries have captured the public imagination like the explosion of exoplanetary science during the past two decades. This work has fundamentally changed our picture of Earth's place in the Universe and led NASA to make…
We estimate the capture rate of interstellar objects by means of three-body gravitational interactions. We apply this model to the Sun-Jupiter system and the Alpha Centauri A\&B binary system, and find that the radius of the largest…
Cosmic radiation backgrounds are a constraint on life, and their distribution will affect the Galactic Habitable Zone. Life on Earth has developed in the context of these backgrounds, and characterizing event rates will elaborate the…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
The breadth of topics that encompass the search for life has expanded and evolved significantly since the emergence of the field of astrobiology. Initial astrobiology centered investigations focused on detecting biosignatures in the Martian…
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…
Spreading of life-bearing spores across the Galaxy (panspermia) may be easier than is usually acknowledged.
Exoplanet observations promise one day to unveil the presence of extraterrestrial life. Atmospheric compounds in strong chemical disequilibrium would point to large-scale biological activity just as oxygen and methane do in the Earth's…
We review the development of dust science from the first ground-based astronomical observations of dust in space to compositional analysis of individual dust particles and their source objects. A multitude of observational techniques is…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Gamma-ray emission produced by interactions between cosmic rays (CRs) and interstellar gas traces the product of their densities throughout the Milky Way. The outer Galaxy is a privileged target of investigation to separate interstellar…
Does life exist outside our Solar System? A first step towards searching for life outside our Solar System is detecting life on Earth by using remote sensing applications. One powerful and unambiguous biosignature is the circular…
Freeze-out of the gas phase elements onto cold grains in dense interstellar and circumstellar media builds up ice mantles consisting of molecules that are mostly formed in situ (H2O, NH3, CO2, CO, CH3OH, and more). This review summarizes…