Related papers: Earth-like planet predictor: A machine learning ap…
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…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
Most rocky planets in the galaxy orbit a cool host star, and there is large uncertainty among theoretical models whether these planets can retain an atmosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might be able to settle this question…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
Over the past decade, the study of extrasolar planets has evolved rapidly from plain detection and identification to comprehensive categorization and characterization of exoplanet systems and their atmospheres. Atmospheric retrieval, the…
Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
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…
Recent radial velocity observations have indicated that Jovian-type planets can exist in moderately close binary star systems. Numerical simulations of the dynamical stability of terrestrial-class planets in such environments have shown…
Understanding differences between sub-stellar spectral data and models has proven to be a major challenge, especially for self-consistent model grids that are necessary for a thorough investigation of brown dwarf atmospheres. Using the…
Context: The energy-limited (EL) atmospheric escape approach is used to estimate mass-loss rates for a broad range of planets that host hydrogen-dominated atmospheres as well as for performing atmospheric evolution calculations. Aims: We…
In this paper we present and discuss the criteria for selecting potential target stars suitable for the search for Earth like planets, with a special emphasis on the stellar aspects of habitability. Missions that search for terrestrial…
The goal of finding and characterizing habitable planets in other solar systems represents one of humanity's greatest scientific challenges. NASA and ESA have initiated studies of missions that could accomplish this goal within the next ten…
The habitable zone is defined as the orbital region around a star where planetary feedback cycles buffer atmospheric greenhouse gases that, in combination with solar luminosity, maintain surface temperatures suitable for liquid water.…
Previous work concerning planet formation around low-mass stars has often been limited to large planets and individual systems. As current surveys routinely detect planets down to terrestrial size in these systems, a more holistic approach…
An increasing number of potentially habitable terrestrial planets and planet candidates are found by ongoing planet search programs. The search for atmospheric signatures to establish planetary habitability and the presence of life might be…
Astrometry can detect rocky planets in a broad range of masses and orbital distances and measure their masses and three-dimensional orbital parameters, including eccentricity and inclination, to provide the properties of terrestrial…
A main goal of NASA's Kepler Mission is to establish the frequency of potentially habitable Earth-size planets (eta Earth). Relatively few such candidates identified by the mission can be confirmed to be rocky via dynamical measurement of…
Standard Bayesian retrievals for exoplanet atmospheric parameters from transmission spectroscopy, while well understood and widely used, are generally computationally expensive. In the era of the JWST and other upcoming observatories,…
We show that the claimed confirmed planet Kepler-452b (a.k.a. K07016.01, KIC 8311864) can not be confirmed using a purely statistical validation approach. Kepler detects many more periodic signals from instrumental effects than it does from…