Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO): Living Worlds Community Working Group: The Search for Life on Potentially Habitable Exoplanets
astro-ph.IM
/ Authors
Giada Arney, Niki Parenteau, Natalie Hinkel, Eric Mamajek, Joshua Krissansen-Totton, Stephanie Olson, Edward Schwieterman, Sara Walker, Kevin Fogarty, Ravi Kopparapu
and 18 more authors
Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, Mark Moussa, Sukrit Ranjan, Garima Singh, Clara Sousa-Silva, Ruslan Belikov, Maxwell Frissell, Samantha Gilbert-Janziek, Vincent Kofman, Natasha Latouf, Mary Anne Limbach, Rhonda Morgan, Christopher Stark, Armen Tokadjian, Anna Grace Ulses, Nicholas Wogan, Mike Wong, Amber Young
/ Abstract
The discovery of a biosphere on another planet would transform how we view ourselves, and our planet Earth, in relation to the rest of the cosmos. We now know Earth is one planet among eight circling our sun; our sun is part of a swirling galaxy of over one hundred billion other suns; and our galaxy is one of untold billions in the universe. While we do not yet know how many, if any, other biospheres exist on the countless worlds orbiting countless other suns, we stand at the precipice of a new era of discovery, enabled by powerful new facilities able to peer across the light years into the atmospheres of planets similar to our own. This article is an adaptation of a science case document (SCDD) developed for the NASA Astrophysics Flagship mission the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) Science, Technology, and Architecture Review Team (START) Living Worlds Community Working Group.