Related papers: Water and air consumption aboard interstellar arks
The survival of a genetically healthy multi-generational crew is of a prime concern when dealing with space travel. It has been shown that determining a realistic population size is tricky as many parameters (such as infertility,…
This paper reviews recent observations of water in Galactic interstellar clouds and nearby galactic nuclei. Two results are highlighted: (1) Multi-line H$_2$O mapping of the Orion Bar shows that the water chemistry in PDRs is driven by…
This paper assesses the implications of a recent discovery (Jenkins 2009) that atomic oxygen is being depleted from diffuse interstellar gas at a rate that cannot be accounted for by its presence in silicate and metallic oxide particles. To…
Inferring the climate and surface conditions of terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone is a major goal for the field of exoplanet science. This pursuit will require both statistical analyses of the population of habitable planets as…
The formation of interstellar water has been commonly accepted to occur on the surfaces of icy dust grains in dark molecular clouds at low temperatures (10-20 K), involving hydrogenation reactions of oxygen allotropes. As a result of the…
So far, more than 130 extrasolar planets have been found in multiple stellar systems. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of the planetary formation process can lead to different planetary architectures (i.e. location, size, mass,…
We study water-hydrogen mixtures under planetary interior conditions using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. We determine the thermodynamic properties of various water-hydrogen mixing ratios at temperatures of 2000 and 6000 K for…
The water abundance in a planetary atmosphere provides a key constraint on the planet's primordial origins because water ice is expected to play an important role in the core accretion model of planet formation. However, the water content…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
Mars is the next destination after Earth to support terrestrial life. Decades of Mars exploration has fascinated space explorers to endeavour for a human expedition. But human Mars enterprise is complicated than conventional mission as the…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
Context: Existing SWAS observations and future HIFI/Herschel data require a clear sense of the information content of water emission and absorption lines. Aims: Investigate wether the ground-state transition of ortho-H2O, 1_(10)-1_(01), at…
We assemble a census of the most massive stars in Orion, then use stellar isochrones to estimate their masses and ages, and use these results to establish the stellar content of Orion's individual OB associations. From this, our new…
Water is observed throughout the universe, from diffuse interstellar clouds to protoplanetary disks around young stars, and from comets in our own solar system and exoplanetary atmospheres to galaxies at high redshifts. This review…
Water worlds have been hypothesized as an alternative to photo-evaporation in order to explain the gap in the radius distribution of Kepler exoplanets. We explore water worlds within the framework of a joint mass-radius-period distribution…
Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…
Planets residing in circumstellar habitable zones (CHZs) offer our best opportunities to test hypotheses of life's potential pervasiveness and complexity. Constraining the precise boundaries of habitability and its observational…
A central question surrounding possible human exploration of Mars is whether crewed missions can be supported by available technologies using in situ resources. Here, we show that photovoltaics-based power systems would be adequate and…
Modeling the interior of a planet is difficult because the small number of measured parameters is insufficient to constrain the many variables involved in describing the interior structure and composition. One solution is to invoke…
Super-Earths orbiting M-dwarf stars may be the most common habitable planets in the Universe. However, their habitability is threatened by intense irradiation from their host stars, which drives the escape of water to space and can lead to…