Related papers: Detecting microbiology in the upper atmosphere: re…
I review the major open science questions in exoplanet atmospheres. These are mainly focused in the areas of understanding atmospheric physics, the atmosphere as a window into other realms of planetary physics, and the atmosphere is a…
Indirect detection is the search for the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical probes. Manifestly, it exists right at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, and the discovery potential for dark matter can be…
Using thermal infrared detectors mounted on drones, and applying techniques from astrophysics, we hope to support the field of conservation ecology by creating an automated pipeline for the detection and identification of certain endangered…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…
Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…
To work in unknown outdoor environments, autonomous sampling machines need the ability to target samples despite limited visibility and robotic arm reach distance. We design a heuristic guided search method to speed up the search process…
We propose a novel idea to discover millicharged particles (mCPs) captured by the earth during its existence. It has been demonstrated that the mCPs accumulation inside the earth leads to the enhancement of its number density much larger…
Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…
The EUSO (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) project is developing a new mission concept for the scientific research of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) from space. The EUSO wide-field telescope will look down from space onto the…
An outstanding, multi-disciplinary goal of modern science is the study of the diversity of potentially Earth-like planets and the search for life in them. This goal requires a bold new generation of space telescopes, but even the most…
Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft that finally defines the missions lifetime unless way to compensate for it is provided. This environment is…
Radio waves, perhaps because they are uniquely transparent in our terrestrial atmosphere, as well as the cosmos beyond, or perhaps because they are macroscopic, so the basic instruments of detection (antennas) are easily constructable,…
The question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere is one of the fundamental unknowns about our Universe. Over the past decade more than 200 extra-solar planets have been discovered, providing new urgency for addressing this question…
Molecular oxygen is a strong indicator of life on Earth, and may indicate biological processes on exoplanets too. Recent studies proposed that Earth-like O$_\mathrm{2}$ levels might be detectable on nearby exoplanets using high-resolution…
Astroparticle physics and cosmology allow us to scan the universe through multiple messengers. It is the combination of these probes that improves our understanding of the universe, both in its composition and its dynamics. Unlike other…
Detecting biosignatures, such as molecular oxygen in combination with a reducing gas, in the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets has been a major focus in the search for alien life. We point out that in addition to these generic…
Planets residing in circumstellar habitable zones (CHZs) offer our best opportunities to test hypotheses of life's potential pervasiveness and complexity. Constraining the precise boundaries of habitability and its observational…
Millimeter-waveband spectra of Venus from both the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) seem to indicate there may be evidence (signal-to-noise ratio of about $15\sigma$) of a…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…
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…