Articles in 2023

Is the scientific status of astrobiology undermined by the lack of evidence for alien life, the problematic influence of science fiction, or the use of ‘astrobiology’ as a buzzword for attracting funding? Here we defend the emerging discipline.

The search for life elsewhere involves variables across multiple scales in time and space, often nested hierarchically. We suggest that the emergence of artificial intelligence learning systems offers critically important ways to make progress.

If advanced technological extraterrestrial lifeforms are out there, where are they? Thus goes the Fermi paradox. This Perspective reviews various solutions and proposes that they are either not there or are deliberately hiding from us.

The testing of a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon on 15 November 2021 has prompted renewed efforts in space arms control. A multilateral treaty banning all destructive anti-satellite weapon tests is urgently needed.

On Earth, technological advances required open-air combustion, which needs an oxygen partial pressure of about 18%. This threshold can help guide searches for detectable technospheres on other planets.

The habitability of a planet is defined at a fixed time. A bigger challenge is to understand how that habitability is sustained over geological timescales, and how the underlying processes compare across different planetary bodies.

A low atmospheric carbon abundance can be a ‘habiosignature’ and indicate the presence of substantial surficial liquid water, tectonic activity and/or a biomass in temperate rocky exoplanets. It can potentially be detected by JWST at 4.3 μm in a few tens of transits.

Budget pressures at NASA, specifically arising from the increasing costs of several planetary science mission programmes, have rendered the Venus orbiter VERITAS as collateral damage. Currently on subsistence funding, mission scientists worry about the impact of ongoing delays on Venus exploration.

The NANOGrav collaboration has found light-years long gravitational waves from, most likely, the mergers of millions of supermassive black holes. To keep watching this cosmic dance, we need sustained funding for black hole research.

It’s been an eventful year for robotic missions. From probes of Solar System bodies to large-scale cosmic structures, advances in our understanding of the formation and evolution of the Universe gather speed.

A model investigating the build-up of the atmosphere of Venus shows that it could have originated from a vigorous phase akin to plate tectonics during the first billion years of its evolution.

Measurements of Jupiter’s gravity by the Juno mission have established that the winds extend 3,500 kilometres below the surface. Cylindrically oriented zonal flows provide the best match in a new model using gravity harmonics up to degree 40.

An information-theory-inspired re-analysis of Cassini mass spectrometry data reveals the presence of HCN and partially oxidized organics within the plume of Enceladus. Ongoing redox chemistry may create a habitable environment.

A recent survey suggests that reducing the number of meetings and conferences is a viable way to address concerns about the effectiveness of the modern scientific collaboration process, its effects on the environment and the well-being of the community.

The traditional conference format has been with us for more than a century, and yet the contemporary version remains similar in many ways. Can emerging technologies enable conferencing to evolve? The Future of Meetings community of practice present their findings from bringing virtual reality to three recent conferences.

A reanalysis of Kepler and Hubble data with Bayesian inference and a photodynamical model shows that the two exomoon candidates around Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b have a substantially lower probability to be actual detections than previous analyses suggest.