Abraham Loeb, Rafael A. Batista and David Sloan
Published 18 August 2016 •
© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics,
Volume 2016,
August 2016Citation Abraham Loeb et al JCAP08(2016)040DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/08/040
- Abraham Loeb
AFFILIATIONS
Astronomy department, Harvard University, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
- Rafael A. Batista
AFFILIATIONS
Department of Physics - Astrophysics, University of Oxford, DWB, Keble Road, OX1 3RH, Oxford, U.K.
- David Sloan
AFFILIATIONS
Department of Physics - Astrophysics, University of Oxford, DWB, Keble Road, OX1 3RH, Oxford, U.K.
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AFFILIATIONS
Astronomy department, Harvard University, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
AFFILIATIONS
Department of Physics - Astrophysics, University of Oxford, DWB, Keble Road, OX1 3RH, Oxford, U.K.
AFFILIATIONS
Department of Physics - Astrophysics, University of Oxford, DWB, Keble Road, OX1 3RH, Oxford, U.K.
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1475-7516/2016/08/040
Abstract
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of the Universe, dP(t)/dt, starting from the first stars and continuing to the distant cosmic future. We conservatively restrict our attention to the context of ``life as we know it'' and the standard cosmological model, ΛCDM . We find that unless habitability around low mass stars is suppressed, life is most likely to exist near ∼ 0.1M⊙ stars ten trillion years from now. Spectroscopic searches for biosignatures in the atmospheres of transiting Earth-mass planets around low mass stars will determine whether present-day life is indeed premature or typical from a cosmic perspective.
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