Related papers: Gaia as Solaris: An Alternative Default Evolutiona…
Gaia is a fully-approved all-sky astrometric and photometric survey due for launch in 2011. It will measure accurate parallaxes and proper motions for everything brighter than G=20 (ca. 10^9 stars). Its primary objective is to study the…
The study of origins of life on Earth and the search for life on other planets are closely linked. Prebiotic chemical scenarios can help prioritize planets as targets for the search for life as we know it and can provide informative priors…
The search of life in the Universe is a fundamental problem of astrobiology and a major priority for NASA. A key area of major progress since the NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015 (NAS15) has been a shift from the exoplanet discovery phase to…
The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts has a long tradition in science. This, of course, also applies to the Earth system. With its myriad of processes, spanning from purely physical to life and human activity, the…
The field of exoplanetary science is making rapid progress both in statistical studies of exoplanet properties as well as in individual characterization. As space missions provide an emerging picture of formation and evolution of…
In the coming years, it is likely that the first potentially Earth-like planets will be discovered orbiting other stars. Once found, the characterisation of those planets will play a vital role in determining which will be chosen as the…
A wealth of Earth-sized exoplanets will be discovered in the coming years, proving a large pool of candidates from which the targets for the search for life beyond the Solar system will be chosen. The target selection process will require…
The GAIA mission will produce an extraordinary database from which we should be able to deduce not only the Galaxy's current structure, but also much of its history, and thus cast a powerful light on the way in which galaxies in general are…
Here we review how environmental context can be used to interpret whether O2 is a biosignature in extrasolar planetary observations. This paper builds on the overview of current biosignature research discussed in Schwieterman et al. (2017),…
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…
Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called…
Exoplanet hunting efforts have revealed the prevalence of exotic worlds with diverse properties, including Earth-sized bodies, which has fueled our endeavor to search for life beyond the Solar System. Accumulating experiences in…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
Gaia is an all sky, high precision astrometric and photometric satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) due for launch in 2010-2011. Its primary mission is to study the composition, formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Gaia will…
We explore how questions related to developing a sustainable human civilization can be cast in terms of astrobiology. In particular we show how ongoing astrobiological studies of the coupled relationship between life, planets and their…
Future observations of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres will occur for planets at different stages of geological evolution. We expect to observe a wide variety of atmospheres and planets with alternative evolutionary paths, with some…
We review the field of exoplanetary biosignatures with a main focus upon atmospheric gas-phase species. Due to the paucity of data in Earth-like planetary atmospheres a common approach is to extrapolate knowledge from the Solar System and…
If we consider Big History as simply 'our' example of the process of cosmic evolution playing out, then we can seek to broaden our view of our possible fate as a species by asking questions about what paths or trajectories other species'…
Many exoplanets have orbital characteristics quite different from those seen in our own solar system, including planets locked in orbital resonances and planets on orbits that are elliptical or highly inclined from their host star's spin…
In May 2013, I responded with the present paper to ESA's call for White Papers for the definition of Large missions. This was half a year before the launch of ESA's large astrometry mission Gaia. The present proposal for a Gaia successor…