Exoplanet Habitability: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective from the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting

To the point

Giada Arney, Stephen Kane, Katherine Garcia-Sage, and David Brain say that identifying truly habitable exoplanets requires a cross-disciplinary, holistic approach that combines astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics, and planetary science, uses direct imaging and solar-system analogs to test models, and acknowledges that many planets in the habitable zone may still be uninhabitable due to magnetic fields, stellar radiation, space weather, and atmospheric loss.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio | 2017 AGU Habitability Press Conference
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NASA Scientific Visualization Studio | 2017 AGU Habitability Press Conference

Spanning Disciplines to Search for Life Beyond EarthThe search for life beyond Earth is riding a surge of creativity and innovation. Following a gold rush of exoplanet discovery over the past two decades, it is time to tackle the next step: determining which of the known exoplanets are proper candidates for life. Scientists from NASA and two universities presented new results dedicated to this task in fields spanning astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science — demonstrating how a cross-disciplinary approach is essential to finding life on other worlds — at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Dec. 13, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.PANELISTS:• Giada Arney, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center• Stephen Kane, University of California-Riverside• Katherine Garcia-Sage, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Catholic University of America• Dave Brain, University of Colorado-Boulder ||