Related papers: Solar System Migration Points to a Renewed Concept…
We present a new investigation of the habitability of the Milky Way bulge, that expands previous studies on the Galactic Habitable Zone. We discuss existing knowledge on the abundance of planets in the bulge, metallicity and the possible…
Magnetoconvection at the solar surface governs the dynamics in the upper solar atmosphere and sustains the heliosphere. Properties of this fundamental process are poorly described near the solar poles. Here we report the first…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
Recent theoretical work suggests that it may be common for stars in the disks of spiral galaxies to migrate radially across significant distances in the disk. Such migrations are a result of resonant scattering with spiral arms and move the…
If the origin of life and the evolution of observers on a planet is favoured by atypical properties of a planet's host star, we would expect our Sun to be atypical with respect to such properties. The Sun has been described by previous…
The relative abundances of the radionuclides in the solar system at the time of its birth are crucial arbiters for competing hypotheses regarding the birth environment of the Sun. The presence of short-lived radionuclides, as evidenced by…
Our Sun, like all stars, formed within a cold molecular cloud. Astronomical observations and theory provide considerable detail into this process. Yet cosmochemical observations of short lived radionuclides in primitive meteorites, in…
Stars born on near-circular orbits in spiral galaxies can subsequently migrate to different orbits due to interactions with non-axisymmetric disturbances within the disc such as bars or spiral arms. This paper extends the study of migration…
In a previous study published in Astrobiology, we focused on the evolution of habitability of a 10 M_E super-Earth planet orbiting a star akin to the Sun. This study was based on a concept of planetary habitability in accordance to the…
The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this…
Determining planetary habitability is a complex matter, as the interplay between a planet's physical and atmospheric properties with stellar insolation has to be studied in a self consistent manner. Standardized atmospheric models for…
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…
The evolution of the Milky Way disk, which contains most of the stars in the Galaxy, is affected by several phenomena. For example, the bar and the spiral arms of the Milky Way induce radial migration of stars and can trap or scatter stars…
The continuous flux of Galactic cosmic rays that bombard Earth's atmosphere creates ionizing radiation that can damage the DNA of living organisms. While this radiation on Earth is relatively constant in the short term, large and long-scale…
We investigate whether it is possible that viable microbes could have been transported to Earth from the planets in extra-solar systems by means of natural vehicles such as ejecta expelled by comet or asteroid impacts on such planets. The…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
The unexpected diversity of exoplanets includes a growing number of super- Earth planets, i.e., exoplanets with masses of up to several Earth masses and a similar chemical and mineralogical composition as Earth. We present a thermal…
We make use of APOGEE and $Gaia$ data to identify stars that are consistent with being born in the same association or star cluster as the Sun. We limit our analysis to stars that match solar abundances within their uncertainties, as they…
We study the dynamics of the solar basin -- the accumulated population of weakly-interacting particles on bound orbits in the Solar System. We focus on particles starting off on Sun-crossing orbits, corresponding to initial conditions of…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…