Related papers: Gaia as Solaris: An Alternative Default Evolutiona…
The Gaia hypothesis postulates that life regulates its environment to be favorable for its own survival. Most planets experience numerous perturbations throughout their lifetimes such as asteroid impacts, volcanism, and the evolution of…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
With the growing number of discovered exoplanets, the Gaia concept finds its second wind. The Gaia concept defines that the biosphere of an inhabited planet regulates a planetary climate through feedback loops such that the planet remains…
The search for habitable exoplanets inspires the question - how do habitable planets form? Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The…
Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
The Daisy World model has long served as a foundational framework for understanding the self-regulation of planetary biospheres, providing insights into the feedback mechanisms that may govern inhabited exoplanets. In this study, we extend…
This article reviews the emerging field of exo-geoscience, focusing on the geological and geophysical processes thought to influence the evolution and (eu)habitability of rocky exoplanets. We examine the possible roles of planetary…
The Gaia hypothesis considers the life-environment coupled system as a single entity that acts to regulate and maintain habitable conditions on Earth. In this paper we discuss three mechanisms which could potentially lead to Gaia: Selection…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
Thousands of planets beyond our solar system have been discovered to date, dozens of which are rocky in composition and are orbiting within the circumstellar habitable zone of their host star. The next frontier in life detection beyond our…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to…
In the coming years and decades, advanced space- and ground-based observatories will allow an unprecedented opportunity to probe the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable exoplanets for signatures of life. Life on Earth, through…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
It is often presumed, that life evolves relatively fast on planets with clement conditions, at least in its basic forms, and that extended periods of habitability are subsequently needed for the evolution of higher life forms. Many planets…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
The search for an inhabited planet, other than our own, is a driver of planetary exploration in our solar system and beyond. Using information from our own planet to inform search strategies allows for a targeted search. It is, however,…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…
Upcoming next generation galactic surveys, such as GAIA and HERMES, will deliver unprecedented detail about the structure and make-up of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and promise to radically improve our understanding of it. However, to…