Related papers: Community need for an Astrobiology Sample Reposito…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
A fundamental astrobiological question is whether life can be transported between extrasolar systems. We propose a new strategy to answer this question based on the principle that life which arose via spreading will exhibit more clustering…
Over the past decade, research in resolved stellar populations has made great strides in exploring the nature of dark matter, in unraveling the star formation, chemical enrichment, and dynamical histories of the Milky Way and nearby…
The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package…
The proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory is intended to observe the atmospheres of nearby terrestrial exoplanets with a resolution greater than that of any previous instrument. While these observations present a substantial opportunity for…
The search for life on extrasolar planets is based on the assumption that one can screen extrasolar planets for habitability spectroscopically. The first space born instruments able to detect as well as characterize extrasolar planets,…
A next generation of space-based observatories aims to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars using reflected light spectroscopy. However, it remains unclear how such direct imaging…
Today, there exists a wide variety of algorithms dedicated to high-contrast imaging, especially for the detection and characterisation of exoplanet signals. These algorithms are tailored to address the very high contrast between the…
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware…
One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially Earth-like…
Astronomy is the study of the Universe and all the objects that it comprises. Our attention is therefore usually focused beyond Earth, home to the only form of life known today. However, how can we continue to explore the secrets of the…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
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…
Over 300 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been detected orbiting nearby stars. We now hope to conduct a census of all planets around nearby stars and to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces with spectroscopy. Rocky planets within…
The search for extrasolar planets in the past decades has shown that planets abound in the Solar neighborhood. While we are still missing an Earth twin, the forthcoming space missions and ground-based instrumentation are already driven to…
We explore a much-neglected area of SETI: solar system techno-signatures. As our cursory solar system exploration consolidates into commercial industrialisation, it is crucial that we determine what to look for and where. We first consider…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…
The prevalence of AI-generated imagery has raised concerns about the authenticity of astronomical images, especially with advanced text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion producing highly realistic synthetic samples. Existing detection…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
The world faces increasing challenges related to climate change and shifting geopolitical situations. The COVID 19 pandemic clearly illustrated the need for resilience not just within civil engineering but also within social and economic…