The Path to Extrasolar Biosignatures

In the field of extrasolar planets an exciting narrative is emerging:  With the fantastic data from NASA’s Kepler Mission in hand, we can predict how many nearby stars host potentially habitable exoplanets.  Of these nearby systems, NASA’s future TESS Mission will discover those that transit small, M dwarf stars, and the James Webb Space Telescope may be capable of searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of these planets.  However, each step in this narrative is full of challenges.  I will discuss our research programs at Boston University aimed at choosing the best possible M dwarf targets for JWST characterization from the future TESS discoveries.  As an aside, I will also discuss our recent calculation of the prevalence of rocky, compact multiple exoplanets orbiting mid-M dwarf stars, similar in orbital structure to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, depicted in the attached image.