This Research Topic targets interdisciplinary themes arising from the growth of exoplanetary research and biogenicity—the origin and distribution of life in the universe. By integrating insights from astrobiology, planetary science, and exoplanetary astronomy, we seek to uncover how cosmic conditions influence the conditions for life, for habitable zones of silicate-rich bodies like Mars and ocean worlds like Europa, for the progression of biogenicity on a planet as life undergoes expansion and extinction over geologic time scales, and for the methods of biosignature characterization with Earth as the sole reference.

Recent advancements in telescopic technologies like the James Webb Telescope, and orbital-in situ missions within the solar system like Perseverance, have provided unprecedented life-relevant data. Examples include the nature of sustained serpentinization on Mars, and methane in the atmosphere of exoplanets like the possibly Hycean K2-18 b.

Meanwhile, the shift to knowledge economies across the world has enabled pioneering missions by emergent space-faring nations like the UAE, India, and the Republic of Korea, which are rapidly globalizing humanity’s answer to the eternal quest: are we the universe’s sole habitat? Such developments, including NASA’s Moon to Mars program for anthropic missions and the ongoing National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study on “the science strategy for the human exploration of Mars” necessitate a transdisciplinary approach to interpret the interplay between astronomical conditions and the possibility of biogenic processes. Contributors are invited to explore diverse topics unified by the thread of life, from the role of stellar evolution to the detection of biosignatures in atmospheric chemistry.

This Topic accepts Original Research, Review, Perspective, and Methods articles. Themes of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• What distinguishes the cellular basis of life from geologic counterparts?

• The influence of changing stellar radiation on planetary habitability

• The role of cosmic events, such as supernovae, in distributing elements crucial for habitability

• Methods for characterizing habitability, including of exoplanets

• The geologic (e.g., serpentinization; planetary soils) and celestial mechanic (e.g., obliquity cycles) controls on habitability up to the solar system’s cosmographic boundary, including moons, asteroids, dwarf planets, and Oort cloud bodies

• Processes enabling geologically sustained habitable zones, such as serpentinization and radiogenic geothermal fluxes, including emerging context sites of Earth (e.g., Sri Lanka’s serpentinite bodies)

• Technological advancements in telescopes, body-specific robotic missions, and anthropic missions

• Discoveries and methods of biosignature detection, including micro-taphonomy

• Case studies of astrobiological interest, such as Mars, Europa, Enceladus, WASP-80 b, etc.

• Modeling the distribution of life at galactic scales to enhance testability of the conceptual formulation by Frank Drake

• The implications of extremophiles on Earth for extraterrestrial biogenicity

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Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences

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