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NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will search for biosignatures on Earth-like exoplanets using reflected light spectroscopy. A critical instrument design parameter is resolving power, which must balance biosignature detectability…
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres through transit spectra is becoming increasingly feasible, and technology for direct detection remains ongoing. The possibility of detecting spectral features could enable quantitative…
At present, because of observational selection effects, we know of no exoplanetary systems with any planetary masses close to that of the Earth. We have therefore used computer models to see whether such planets could be dynamically stable…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) concept and the 2020 Decadal Survey's recommendation to develop a large space telescope to "detect and characterize Earth-like extrasolar planets" requires new starlight suppression technologies to…
The planned NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) flagship mission aims to image and spectroscopically characterise 25 Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of their stars. However, one giant planet in the habitable zone can ruin your…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
This paper proposes a new general approach based on Bayesian networks to model the human behaviour. This approach represents human behaviour with probabilistic cause-effect relations based on knowledge, but also with conditional…
It is investigated how biofriendly is the Milky Way for photosynthetic life. Special attention is dedicated to the role of the photobiological regime in the emergence and evolution of this kind of life in terrestrial planets. Following this…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
The data post-processing gain is an important parameter for exposure time calculations used to inform the design of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). Assuming azimuthally symmetric noise properties is a common simplifying assumption…
The breadth of topics that encompass the search for life has expanded and evolved significantly since the emergence of the field of astrobiology. Initial astrobiology centered investigations focused on detecting biosignatures in the Martian…
The search for a second instance of life is one of the greatest problems of modern science. Outside of creating an artificial origin of life on Earth, the primary targets for the search for life are planets inside or outside the solar…
In the framework of the Europlanet-RI program, a prototype of Virtual Observatory dedicated to Planetary Science was defined. Most of the activity was dedicated to the elaboration of standards to retrieve and visualize data in this field,…
Pollux is a candidate European instrument contribution to the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), designed to advance our understanding of the formation and evolution of cosmic structures in the universe, and specifically search signs of…
The current explosion in detection and characterization of thousands of extrasolar planets from the Kepler mission, the Hubble Space Telescope, and large ground-based telescopes opens a new era in searches for Earth-analog exoplanets with…
Over the past decade, exoplanet atmospheric characterization has became what some might call the cosmology of astronomy. In an attempt to extract and understand the weak planetary signals (a few percent down to a few tens of ppm times that…
The search for signs of life in the Universe has entered a new phase with the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Detecting biosignature gases via exoplanet atmosphere transmission spectroscopy is in principle within JWST's…
Observing habitable exoplanets that may resemble Earth is a key priority in astronomy that is dependent on not only detecting such worlds, but also ascertaining that apparent signatures of habitability are not due to other sources. Space…
Future missions, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will aim to image Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars in reflected light. Determining whether an exoplanet is in the habitable zone of its star may be difficult in…