Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Relative likelihood for life as a function of cosmic time
AU - Loeb, Abraham
AU - Batista, Rafael A.
AU - Sloan, David
PY - 2016/8/18
Y1 - 2016/8/18
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/08/040
DO - 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/08/040
M3 - Journal article
VL - 2016
SP - 40
JO - Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
JF - Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
SN - 1475-7516
IS - 08
ER -