Related papers: Atmospheric Seasonality as an Exoplanet Biosignatu…
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…
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…
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…
Understanding the possible climatic conditions on rocky extrasolar planets, and thereby their potential habitability, is one of the major subjects of exoplanet research. Determining how the climate, as well as potential atmospheric…
O2 and O3 have been long considered the most robust individual biosignature gases in a planetary atmosphere, yet multiple mechanisms that may produce them in the absence of life have been described. However, these abiotic planetary…
Direct-imaging observations of terrestrial exoplanets will enable their atmospheric characterization and habitability assessment. Considering the Earth, the key atmospheric signatures for the biosphere is O$_2$ and the photochemical product…
Chemical disequilibrium in exoplanetary atmospheres (detectable with remote spectroscopy) can indicate life. The modern Earth's atmosphere-ocean system has a much larger chemical disequilibrium than other solar system planets with…
Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of earth-sized planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming years, the…
(Abridged) Super Earth exoplanets are being discovered with increasing frequency and some will be able to retain stable H2-dominated atmospheres. We study biosignature gases on exoplanets with thin H2 atmospheres and habitable surface…
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…
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…
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…
The current explosion in detection and characterization of thousands of extrasolar planets from the Kepler mission, the Hubble Space Telescope, and large ground-based telescopes opens a new era in searches for Earth-analog exoplanets with…
Future telescopes such as the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) will enable mid-infrared characterisation of the atmospheres of nearby rocky exoplanets. Whilst 4D spatial and temporal variations of Earth as an exoplanet are below…
Warm rocky exoplanets within the habitable zone of Sun-like stars are favoured targets for current and future missions. Theory indicates these planets could be wet at formation and remain habitable long enough for life to develop. In this…
The search for life on exoplanets is one of the grand scientific challenges of our time. The strategy to date has been to find (e.g., through transit surveys like Kepler) Earth-like exoplanets in their stars habitable zone, then use…
In order to assess observational evidence for potential atmospheric biosignatures on exoplanets, it will be essential to test whether spectral fingerprints from multiple gases can be explained by abiotic or biotic-only processes. Here, we…
The first opportunity to detect indications for life outside the Solar System may be provided already within the next decade with upcoming missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the European Extremely Large Telescope…
An increasing number of potentially habitable terrestrial planets and planet candidates are found by ongoing planet search programs. The search for atmospheric signatures to establish planetary habitability and the presence of life might be…
Oxygen is a promising exoplanet biosignature due to the evolutionary advantage conferred by harnessing starlight for photosynthesis, and the apparent low likelihood of maintaining oxygen-rich atmospheres without life. Hypothetical scenarios…