Related papers: Gaia as Solaris: An Alternative Default Evolutiona…
Context: Many if not most planetary nebulae (PNe) are now thought to be the outcome of binary evolutionary scenarios. However only a few percent of PNe in the Milky Way are known to host binary systems. The high precision repeated observing…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere…
ESA's Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (GAIA) holds the promise of mapping out the detailed phase space structure of the Galactic halo by providing unprecedented annual proper motion and parallax of $1-10\muas$ astrometric…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Gaia has revealed a clear signal of disequilibrium in the solar neighborhood in the form of a spiral (or snail) feature in the vertical phase-space distribution. We investigate the possibility that this structure emerges from ongoing…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
Star clusters are among the first celestial objects catalogued by early astronomers. As simple and coeval populations, their study has been instrumental in charting the properties of the Milky Way and providing insight into stellar…
The Gaia data will help to improve the construction of a luminosity function for the disk and the halo and will provide a more accurate determination of the age of our solar neighborhood. Moreover, reliable stellar dynamical investigations…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
The proposed global astrometry mission {\it GAIA}, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program, appears capable of surveying the solar neighborhood within $\sim$ 200 pc for the astrometric…
A suite of vast stellar surveys mapping the Milky Way, culminating in the Gaia mission, is revolutionizing the empirical information about the distribution and properties of stars in the Galactic stellar disk. We review and lay out what…
Quasars are often considered to be point-like objects. This is largely true and allows for an excellent alignment of the optical positional reference frame of the ongoing ESA mission Gaia with the International Celestial Reference Frame.…
Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten…
GAIA is a short-listed candidate for the ESA Cornerstone mission C5, meeting the ESA Survey Committee requirement for an observatory mission, dedicated to astrometry, providing 10 micro-arcsecond accuracy at 15th magnitude. The GAIA mission…
The radius valley, a bifurcation in the size distribution of small, close-in exoplanets, is hypothesized to be a signature of planetary atmospheric loss. Such an evolutionary phenomenon should depend on the age of the star-planet system. In…
Given the considerable percentage of stars that are members of binaries or stellar multiples in the Solar neighborhood, it is expected that many of these binaries host planets, possibly even habitable ones. The discovery of a terrestrial…
Oceanic planets formed by type Ia supernovae become spectacularly abundant as stars cease to shine. However, the timing may not be altogether inappropriate. Neutrino annihilation might thermally regulate iron-cored water-worlds, sustaining…