Related papers: A Ride to Exoplanets: Finding Potentially Habitabl…
FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
There are many competing theories and models describing the formation, migration and evolution of exoplanet systems. As both the precision with which we can characterize exoplanets and their host stars, and the number of systems for which…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
More than a thousand exoplanets have been discovered over the last decade. Perhaps more excitingly, probing their atmospheres has become possible. With current data we have glimpsed the diversity of exoplanet atmospheres that will be…
Since more than a century we investigate cosmic particles coming from the Universe with the aim of understanding their nature, their origin and how they are accelerated. So far, cosmic rays have provided many impressive results, giving…
In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…
For the last few decades the study of disks around stars young and old and of different types have progressed significantly. During the same time a completely new discipline, the study of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our…
In the last few decades, reading the literature, we realized that we Astronomers have a strong preference to undertake very ambitious projects, and search for answers to the most fundamental questions in the history of the entire Universe.…
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…
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…
The ultimate goal of exoplanetologists is to discover life outside our Earth and to fully understand our place in the Universe. Even though we have never been closer to attaining this goal, we still need to understand how and where the…
In recent years, numerical models that were developed for Earth have been adapted to study exoplanetary climates to understand how the broad range of possible exoplanetary properties affects their climate state. The recent discovery and…
The past twenty years have revealed the diversity of planets that exist in the Universe. It turned out that most of exoplanets are different from the planets of our Solar System and thus, everything about them needs to be explored. Thanks…
Numerous telescopes and techniques have been used to find and study extrasolar planets, but none has been more successful than NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, the smallest planets to…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
In the last 15 years, since the discovery of the first low-mass planets beyond the solar system, there has been tremendous progress in understanding the diversity of (super-)Earth and sub-Neptune exoplanets. Especially the influence of the…
The ultimate goal of astrobiology is to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word "biosignature" suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating a particular process…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
The last 25 years have been revolutionary in astronomy, as the field of exoplanets has gone from no known planets outside the Solar System to thousands discovered over the last year few years. This represents a rapid increase not just in…