Related papers: Panspermia Revisited
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
We investigate whether it is possible that viable microbes could have been transported to Earth from the planets in extra-solar systems by means of natural vehicles such as ejecta expelled by comet or asteroid impacts on such planets. The…
The rate of internally-driven evolution of galaxy discs is strongly affected by the lifetimes of the spiral patterns they support. Evolution is much faster if the spiral patterns are recurrent short-lived transients rather than long-lived,…
Studies of galaxy evolution at optical and near-infrared wavelengths have reached an interesting point in their historical development and the arrival of a new millenium provides an appropriate occasion to review the overall direction in…
One primary reason for the formulation of the term Earth-like planet and the search for such planets in the galaxy is because life has arisen in such a world. Thus, this search seems justifiable as it is known here what one is looking for.…
The light distribution in the disks of many galaxies is non-axisymmetric or `lopsided' with a spatial extent much larger along one half of a galaxy than the other, as in M101. Recent near-IR observations show that lopsidedness is common.…
Nuclear supersymmetry is reviewed and some of its applications and extensions are discussed, together with a proposal for new, more stringent and precise tests to probe the supersymmetry classification, in particular, correlations between…
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed…
Over the past 10 years abundant evidence has emerged that many (if not all) stars are born with circumstellar disks. Understanding the evolution of post-accretion disks can provide strong constraints on theories of planet formation and…
We study the prospects for life on planets with subsurface oceans, and find that a wide range of planets can exist in diverse habitats with ice envelopes of moderate thickness. We quantify the energy sources available to these worlds, the…
The observation that old, massive galaxies have a larger fraction of low-mass stars than their younger, lower-mass counterparts adds to mounting evidence that star formation may have been different in the early Universe.
Diffusion of tracer particles in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is often anomalous with a marked heterogeneity even within individual particle trajectories. Despite considerable efforts, the mechanisms behind these observations have…
An asexual set of primitive bacteria is simulated with a bit-string Penna model with a Fermi function for survival. A recent hypothesis by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley on the evolution of sex from asexual cells as a strategy for trying to…
Pulsars are factories of relativistic electrons and positrons that propagate away from the pulsar, permeating later our Galaxy. The acceleration and propagation of these particles are a matter of intense debate. In the last few years, we…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
We model hypothetical bio-dispersal within a single Galactic region using the stochastic infection dynamics process, which is inspired by these local properties of life dispersal on Earth. We split the population of stellar systems into…
Life appears to have emerged relatively quickly on the Earth, a fact sometimes used to justify a high rate of spontaneous abiogenesis ($\lambda$) among Earth-like worlds. Conditioned upon a single datum - the time of earliest evidence for…
The recent discovery of potentially habitable exoplanets around Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1 has attracted much attention due to their potential for hosting life. We delineate a simple model that accurately describes the evolution of…
It is experimentally known that virus exhibits stochastic motion in cytoplasm of a living cell in the free form as well as the form being contained in the endosome and the exponent of anomalous diffusion of the virus fluctuates depending on…
We present angle- and polarization-resolved measurements of the optical transmission of a subwavelength hole array. These results give a (far-field) visualization of the corresponding (near-field) propagation of the excited surface plasmons…