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Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of system configurations, the great…

The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…

Atmospheric retrieval studies are essential to determine the science requirements for future generation missions, such as the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE). The use of heterogeneous absorption cross-sections might be the cause…

The first detected member of a new astronomical class is often not representative of the underlying population, but instead reflects the selection effects of the observing technique that found it. We apply this idea to the first remote…

Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…

The astrobiology is an interdisciplinary science, combining the methods and the means of physics, biology, chemistry and astronomy. Its main purpose is to find out if the exoplanets are habitable and if so, to confirm life on them. The…

The search for what differentiates inanimate matter from living things began in antiquity as a search for a "fundamental life force" embedded deep within living things - a special material unit owned only by life - later transforming to…

A recent study reported that there is evidence life may have originated prior to the formation of the Earth. That conclusion was based on a regression analysis of a certain data set involving evolution of functional genome size across major…

The search for life on exoplanets is motivated by the universal ways in which life could modify its planetary environment. Atmospheric gases such as oxygen and methane are promising candidates for such environmental modification due to the…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital security, biometric authentication systems, particularly facial recognition, have emerged as integral components of various security protocols. However, the reliability of these systems is…

Previous work on possible surface reflectance biosignatures for Earth-like planets has typically focused on analogues to spectral features produced by photosynthetic organisms on Earth, such as the vegetation red edge. Although oxygenic…

A fundamental astrobiological question is whether life can be transported between extrasolar systems. We propose a new strategy to answer this question based on the principle that life which arose via spreading will exhibit more clustering…

The Earth viewed from outside the Solar system would be identified merely like a pale blue dot, as coined by Carl Sagan. In order to detect possible signatures of the presence of life on a second earth among several terrestrial planets…

Telescope missions are currently being designed which will make direct imaging of habitable exoplanets possible in the near future, and studies are needed to quantify the detectability of biosignature features in the planet's reflectance…

This paper reports the first application of a new technique to measure the beta-decay half -lives of exotic nuclei in complex background conditions. Since standard tools were not adapted to extract the relevant information, a new analysis…

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) makes certain assumptions which guide all current search programs. To illustrate some, this includes (1) that interstellar flight is not possible (2) that the motivations of interstellar…

The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…

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…

The emergence of self-replication and information transmission in life's origin remains unexplained despite extensive research on the topic. A hypothesis explaining the transition from a simple organic world to a complex RNA world is…

The biosignatures of life on Earth do not remain static, but change considerably over the planet's habitable lifetime. Earth's future biosphere, much like that of the early Earth, will consist of predominantly unicellular microorganisms due…