Related papers: Molecular Cloud Biology
Potentially habitable exoplanets are targets of great interest for the James Webb Space Telescope and upcoming mission concepts such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Clouds strongly affect climate and habitability, but predicting their…
Recent years have witnessed the detection of an increasing number of complex organic molecules in interstellar space, some of them being of prebiotic interest. Disentangling the origin of interstellar prebiotic chemistry and its connection…
A milestone in understanding life in the universe is the detection of biosignature gases in the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets. Future mission concepts under study by the 2020 decadal survey, e.g., HabEx and LUVOIR, have the potential…
The primary present-day observables upon which theories of galaxy evolution are based are a system's morphology, dynamics, colour, and chemistry. Individually, each provides an important constraint to any given model; in concert, the four…
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…
With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
Recent detections of potentially habitable exoplanets around sunlike stars demand increased exploration of the physical conditions that can sustain life, by whatever methods available. Insight into these conditions can be gained by…
The experiment of exo-ecosystem and the exploration of extraterrestrial habitability aims to explore the adaptation of terrestrial life in space conditions for the manned space program and the future interstellar migration, which shows…
The search for extraterrestrial life hinges on identifying biosignatures, often focusing on gaseous metabolic byproducts as indicators. However, most such biosignatures require assuming specific metabolic processes. It is widely recognized…
The complexity of biological systems and processes, spanning molecular to macroscopic scales, necessitates the use of multiscale simulations to get a comprehensive understanding. Quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) molecular…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
The current progress in the detection of terrestrial type exoplanets has opened a new avenue in the characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres and in the search for biosignatures of life with the upcoming ground-based and space missions.…
In this paper, we review some of the properties of dense molecular cloud cores. The results presented here rely on three-dimensional numerical simulations of isothermal, magnetized, turbulent, and self-gravitating molecular clouds (MCs) in…
Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global…
We discuss three different aspects of the quantum dynamics of bio-molecular systems and more generally complex networks in the presence of strongly coupled environments. Firstly, we make a case for the systematic study of fundamental…
Polytropic models are reasonably successful in acounting for the observed features of molecular clouds. Multi-pressure polytropes include the various pressure components that are important in molecular clouds, whereas composite polytropes…
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…
Quantum Biology is emerging as a new field at the intersection between fundamental physics and biology, promising novel insights into the nature and origin of biological order. We discuss several elements of QBCL (Quantum Biology at…
The optical and infrared spectra of a wide variety of `cool' astronomical objects including the Sun, sunspots, K-, M- and S-type stars, carbon stars, brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets are reviewed. The review provides the necessary…