How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life
By L. Kaltenegger. 2017
190 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The detection of exoplanets orbiting other stars has revolutionized our view of the cosmos. First results suggest that it is teeming with a fascinating diversity of rocky planets, including those in the habitable zone. Even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, harbors a small planet in its habitable zone, Proxima b. With the next generation of telescopes, we will be able to peer into the atmospheres of rocky planets and get a glimpse into other worlds. Using our own planet and its wide range of biota as a Rosetta stone, we explore how we could detect habitability and signs of life on exoplanets over interstellar distances. Current telescopes are not yet powerful enough to characterize habitable exoplanets, but the next generation of telescopes that is already being built will have the capabilities to characterize close-by habitable worlds. The discussion on what makes a planet a habitat and how to detect signs of life is lively. This review will show the latest results, the challenges of how to identify an...
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9247b3f136a320ad0a414f3a6663bb926cbd294d
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Exoplanetary Atmospheres: Key Insights, Challenges, and Prospects (2019, background): “For example, while planets around M dwarfs may be subject to an extremely harsh UV environment which can be catastrophic for terrestrial-like life (234, 119), the same environments may also be conducive for abiogenesis, producing species essential for primordial life such as HCN (216, 217).”