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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…
Cosmic rays can penetrate planetary atmospheres driving the formation of prebiotic molecules, which are important for the origin of life. We calculate the Galactic cosmic ray fluxes in the habitable zone of five nearby, well-studied…
If the origin of life and the evolution of observers on a planet is favoured by atypical properties of a planet's host star, we would expect our Sun to be atypical with respect to such properties. The Sun has been described by previous…
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 habitability of a planet is influenced by both its parent star and the properties of its local stellar neighborhood. Potential threats to habitability from the local stellar environment mainly arise from two factors: cataclysmic events…
The recent identification of several groups of young stars within 100 parsecs of the Sun has generated widespread interest. Given their proximity and possible age differences, these systems are ideally suited for detailed studies of disk…
The context of the Sun in the galactic neighborhood is not well understood, especially when we compare its physical properties to those of nearby stars. Thereby, we still cannot fully comprehend whether or not the Sun is a typical star.…
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…
As of 2025, over 6000 planets are known to orbit stars other than our Sun. We can measure their sizes and orbital periods, infer their masses and temperatures, and constrain their compositions. Based on these data, about 1% of extrasolar…
We explore if carbon-based macromolecules (such as DNA) in the environments of stars other than the Sun are able to survive the effects of photospheric stellar radiation, such as UV-C. Therefore, we focus on main-sequence stars of spectral…
Accurate stellar parameters are needed in numerous domains of astrophysics. The position of stars on the H-R diagram is an important indication of their structure and evolution, and it helps improve stellar models. Furthermore, the age and…
A habitable zone of a star is defined as a range of orbits within which a rocky planet can support liquid water on its surface. The most intriguing question driving the search for habitable planets is whether they host life. But is the age…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
Close encounters of stars to the Sun could affect life on Earth through gravitational perturbations of comets in the Oort cloud or exposure to ionizing radiation. By integrating orbits through the Galactic potential, I identify which of 33…
We have conducted a novel search of most of the southern sky for nearby red dwarfs having low proper motions, with specific emphasis on those with proper motion < 0.18 arcsec yr-1, the lower cutoff of Luyten's classic proper motion catalog.…
Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs are good candidates for the study of habitability and detection of biosignatures. To search for these planets, we analyze all available radial velocity data and apply four signal…
We present a catalog of unbound stellar pairs, within 100 pc of the Sun, that are undergoing close, hyperbolic, encounters. The data are drawn from the GAIA EDR3 catalogue, and the limiting factors are errors in the radial distance and…
Stellar X-ray and UV radiation can significantly affect the survival, composition, and long-term evolution of the atmospheres of planets in or near their host star's habitable zone (HZ). Especially interesting are planetary systems in the…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
The compositions of stars are a critical diagnostic tool for many topics in astronomy such as the evolution of our Galaxy, the formation of planets, and the uniqueness of the Sun. Previous spectroscopic measurements indicate a large…