Related papers: Testing Earth-like atmospheric evolution on exo-Ea…
A planet's spectrum is dynamic and only represents a time-dependent snapshot of its properties. Changing atmospheric conditions due to climate and weather patterns, particularly variation in cloud cover, can significantly affect the…
I review the major open science questions in exoplanet atmospheres. These are mainly focused in the areas of understanding atmospheric physics, the atmosphere as a window into other realms of planetary physics, and the atmosphere is a…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
We review some basic issues of the life-prescribed development of the Earth's system and the Earth's atmosphere and discourse the unity of Earth's type of life in physical and transcendental divisions. In physical division, we exemplify and…
Context: The principle definition of habitability for exoplanets is whether they can sustain liquid water on their surfaces, i.e. that they orbit within the habitable zone. However, the planet's magnetosphere should also be considered,…
(abridged abstract) Theoretical arguments indicate that close-in terrestial exoplanets may have weak magnetic fields. As described in the companion article (Paper I), a weak magnetic field results in a high flux of galactic cosmic rays to…
Among the many recommendations of the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, we found that a priority area of research is to pave the pathways towards finding and characterizing habitable worlds. In this context, we aim to…
A balanced ratio of ocean to land is believed to be essential for an Earth-like biosphere and one may conjecture that plate-tectonics planets should be similar in geological properties. After all, the volume of continental crust evolves…
Methane has been proposed as an exoplanet biosignature. Imminent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope may enable methane detections on potentially habitable exoplanets, so it is essential to assess in what planetary contexts…
Many evolutionary models of giant exoplanets still rely on simplifying assumptions that are no longer adequate given detailed constraints from Jupiter, Saturn, and modern exoplanet observations. Here, we identify the key physical…
Over 300 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been detected orbiting nearby stars. We now hope to conduct a census of all planets around nearby stars and to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces with spectroscopy. Rocky planets within…
We compute the ozone distribution for a model terrestrial paleoatmosphere in which the present oxygen abundance is largely replaced by carbon dioxide, which we argue is a reasonable working assumption. In principle, the presence of carbon…
Aims: The secondary atmospheres of terrestrial planets form and evolve as a consequence of interaction with the interior over geological time. We aim to quantify the influence of planetary bulk composition on the interior--atmosphere…
We couple a simplified model for the galactic chemical evolution, with software that models the condensation of dust in protoplanetary disks and software that models the interior structure of planets in order to estimate the effects that…
Determining which rocky exoplanets have atmospheres, and why, is a key goal for the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, emission observations of individual rocky exoplanets orbiting M stars (M-Earths) have not provided definitive evidence…
Exoplanet exploration has revealed that many$\unicode{x2013}$perhaps most$\unicode{x2013}$terrestrial exoplanets formed with substantial H$_2$-rich envelopes, seemingly in contrast to solar system terrestrials, for which there is scant…
The Milky Way Galaxy is literally teeming with exoplanets; thousands of planets have been discovered, with thousands more planet candidates identified. Terrestrial-like planets are quite common around other stars, and are expected to be…
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…
I show that exoplanets can be used to test origins scenarios. Origins scenarios start with certain initial conditions, proceed via a network of chemical reactions and, if successful, result in a chemistry that is closer to a living system…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…