Related papers: Assessing Ocean World Habitability with HWO
Hazes are common in known planet atmospheres, and geochemical evidence suggests early Earth occasionally supported an organic haze with significant environmental and spectral consequences. The UV spectrum of the parent star drives organic…
The presence of a liquid solvent is widely regarded as an essential prerequisite for habitability. We investigate the conditions under which worlds outside the habitable zones of stars are capable of supporting liquid solvents on their…
The World Space Observatory - Ultraviolet (WSO-UV) space telescope is equipped with high dispersion (55,000) spectrographs working in the 1150-3100 {\AA} spectral range. To evaluate the impact of the design on the scientific objectives of…
A large fraction of white dwarfs (WDs) may host planets in their habitable zones. These planets may provide our best chance to detect bio-markers on a transiting exoplanet, thanks to the diminished contrast ratio between the Earth-sized WD…
Saturn's moon Enceladus offers a unique opportunity in the search for life and habitable environments beyond Earth, a key theme of the National Research Council's 2013-2022 Decadal Survey. A plume of water vapor and ice spews from…
Mini-EUSO (Multiwavelength Imaging New Instrument for the Extreme Universe Space Observatory) is a telescope observing the Earth from the International Space Station since 2019. The instrument employs a Fresnel-lens optical system and a…
The study of planetary habitability beyond Earth remains a central and challenging project in planetary science. Analysis of large volumes of planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, and JWST is directed ultimately at…
Future telescopes will survey temperate, terrestrial exoplanets to estimate the frequency of habitable ($\eta_{\text{Hab}}$) or inhabited ($\eta_{\text{Life}}$) planets. This study aims to determine the minimum number of planets ($N$)…
The habitable fraction of a planet's surface is important for the detectability of surface biosignatures. The extent and distribution of habitable areas is influenced by external parameters that control the planet's climate, atmospheric…
Ice-covered ocean worlds possess diverse energy sources and associated mechanisms that are capable of driving significant seismic activity, but to date no measurements of their seismic activity have been obtained. Such investigations could…
White and brown dwarfs are astrophysical objects that are bright enough to support an insolation habitable zone (IHZ). Unlike hydrogen-burning stars, they cool and become less luminous with time, and hence their IHZ moves in with time. The…
NASA's next flagship observatory, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), aims to detect and charaterize ~25 habitable zone planets. The total number of habitable zone planets detected is referred to as the exo-Earth "yield'' and accurate…
We examine the detectability of water (H2O) in the reflected-light spectrum of an Earth-like exoplanet assuming a photometric observational approach rather than spectroscopic. By quantifying the detectability as a function of normalized…
The growth of luminous structures and the building blocks of life in the Universe began as primordial gas was processed in stars and mixed at galactic scales. The mechanisms responsible for this development are not well understood and have…
Future direct-imaging flagship missions, such as NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), face critical decisions in prioritizing observations due to extremely stringent time and resource constraints. In this paper, we introduce two…
Gravitational Wave (GW) astronomy promises to observe different kinds of astrophysical sources. Here we explore the possibility of detection of GWs from hyperbolic interactions of compact stars with ground-based interferometric detectors.…
Every signal propagating through the universe is at least weakly lensed by the intervening gravitational field. In some situations, wave-optics phenomena (diffraction, interference) can be observed as frequency-dependent modulations of the…
I describe the capabilities of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, scheduled for May 2009 installation on the Hubble Space Telescope. With a factor-of-ten increase in far-UV throughput for moderate resolution spectroscopy, COS will enable a…
The ongoing discovery of exoplanets has sparked significant interest in finding suitable worlds that could potentially support life. Stellar ultraviolet (UV; 100-3000 \AA) radiation may play a crucial role in determining the habitability of…
Determining the habitability of terrestrial exoplanets is a complex problem that represents the next major step for the astrophysical community. The majority of current models treat these planets as homogeneous or contain heterogeneity that…