Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

This article is a review of biosignatures that are used to study habitability and/or the presence of past or present life in our solar system and exoplanets. We discuss the evolution of biosignatures through the period of life on Earth. For the Earth, undisputed biosignatures are only detectable for about a quarter of the Earth’s past. In other periods, detectable biosignatures are not totally reliable and can only determine a statistical likelihood estimate of life on Earth. We also discuss results obtained from various habitability experiments in our solar system. We conclude with a focus on the importance of the study of biosignatures in the new era of exoplanet research with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and the era of extremely large ground-based telescopes.

About Priya Shah Hasan

Dr Priya Hasan is an Asst Professor in Physics at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, India. She did her Integrated Masters from the Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, PhD at Osmania University, Hyderabad in 2004 and post-doctoral research in France and IUCAA, Pune. She was awarded the Women Scientist Award by DST in 2006. She has presented her work in various conferences in India, Europe and US and in the United Nations, Vienna. Her research interests are in observational astronomy, star formation, star clusters and galaxies. . She is the co-Chair of the Women in Astronomy WG- IAU.