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We address three major questions in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets and cosmology. To achieve this goal, two requirements are needed. First a very large aperture to…
Our Earth, being the only living planet that we know, provides us with clues that photosynthetic life-forms may be dominant on other exoplanets for billions of years. Spectropolarimetric signatures of the terrestrial photosynthetic life…
The atmospheres and surfaces of planets show tremendous amount of spatial variation, which has a direct effect on the spectrum of the object, even if this may not be spatially resolved. Here, we apply hyper realistic radiative simulations…
Upcoming NASA astrophysics missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope will search for signs of life on planets transiting nearby stars. Doing so will require co-adding dozens of transmission spectra to build up sufficient signal to…
Ocean-atmosphere chemistry on Earth has undergone dramatic evolutionary changes through its long history, with potentially significant ramifications for the emergence and long-term stability of atmospheric biosignatures. Though a great deal…
High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
After several years of intensive technological development Virtual Observatory resources have reached a level of maturity sufficient for their routine scientific exploitation. The Virtual Observatory is starting to be used by astronomers in…
Thousands of exoplanets orbit nearby stars, showcasing a remarkable diversity in mass, size, and orbits. With the James Webb Space Telescope now operational, we are observing exoplanet atmospheres and aiming to reach down to small,…
The habitable zone (HZ) is the region around a star(s) where standing bodies of water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. The classical HZ definition makes a number of assumptions common to the Earth, including assuming that the…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
In the multiverse hypothesis, a range of universes exist with differing values of our physical constants. Here, we investigate how the probabilities of observing our values of these constants depend on the assumptions made about the…
This review focuses on recent results in advancing our understanding of the location and distribution of habitable exo-Earth environments. We first review the qualities that define a habitable planet/moon environment. We extend these…
Suppose an astronomer is equipped with a device capable of detecting emissions -- whether they be electromagnetic, gravitational, or neutrino -- from transient sources distributed throughout the cosmos. Because of source rate density…
Ground-based telescopes have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the next decade and beyond. Extreme…
The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, has been designed to be the Great Observatory of the 2030s. For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable an affordable space-based telescope mission…
The search for potentially habitable exoplanets centers on detecting biosignature molecules in Earth-like atmospheres, which makes it essential to understand their detectability under biologically and geologically influenced conditions. In…
Future astrophysics missions will seek extraterrestrial life via transmission and direct imaging observations. To assess habitability and biosignatures, we need robust retrieval tools to analyze observed spectra, and infer surface and…
This is a white paper in response to the National Academy of Sciences "Exoplanet Science Strategy" call. We summarize recent advances in theoretical habitability studies and argue that such studies will remain important for guiding and…
This work presents a proposal for a wireless sensor network for participatory sensing, with IoT sensing devices developed especially for monitoring and predicting air quality, as alternatives of high cost meteorological stations. The…