Related papers: Ecological modelling of hycean worlds
We make a preliminary assessment on the habitability of potential rocky exoplanets around Alpha Centauri B. We use several indexes: the Earth Similarity Index, a mathematical model for photosynthesis, and a biological productivity model.…
The recent discoveries of terrestrial exoplanets and super-Earths extending over a broad range of orbital and physical parameters suggest that these planets will span a wide range of climatic regimes. Characterization of the atmospheres of…
Climate transitions on exoplanets offer valuable insights into the atmospheric processes governing planetary habitability. Previous pure-steam atmospheric models show a thermal limit in outgoing long-wave radiation, which has been used to…
Related groups of microbes are widely distributed across Earth's habitats, implying numerous dispersal and adaptation events over evolutionary time. However, to date, relatively little is known about the characteristics and mechanisms of…
Identifying key observables is essential for enhancing our knowledge of exoplanet habitability and biospheres, as well as improving future mission capabilities. While currently challenging, future observatories such as the Large…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
Planet Earth has evolved from an entirely anoxic planet with possibly a different tectonic regime to the oxygenated world with horizontal plate tectonics that we know today. For most of this time, Earth has been inhabited by a purely…
We study the persistence and extinction of species in a simple food chain that is modelled by a Lotka-Volterra system with environmental stochasticity. There exist sharp results for deterministic Lotka-Volterra systems in the literature but…
Lotka Volterra model and its modified forms have long become a major area of interest for periodic motions in nonlinear systems with competitive species. The model given by Volterra shows that its periodicity is dependent on initial…
In the search for life beyond our Solar system, attention should be focused on those planets that have the potential to maintain habitable conditions over the prolonged periods of time needed for the emergence and expansion of life as we…
The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple…
The ongoing searches for exoplanetary systems have revealed a wealth of planets with diverse physical properties. Planets even smaller than the Earth have already been detected, and the efforts of future missions are placed on the…
Our knowledge of planets' orbital dynamics, which was based on Solar System studies, has been challenged by the diversity of exoplanetary systems. Around cool and ultra cool dwarfs, the influence of tides on the orbital and spin evolution…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
The habitable zone (HZ) describes the range of orbital distances around a star where the existence of liquid water on the surface of an Earth-like planet is in principle possible. While 3D climate studies can calculate the water vapor, ice…
A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to…
We use a new interdisciplinary approach to study the UV surface habitability of Proxima $b$ under quiescent and flaring stellar conditions. We assumed planetary atmospheric compositions based on CO$_2$ and N$_2$ and surface pressures from…