Closing gaps to our origins. The UV window into the Universe
Date Issued
2019
Author(s)
Gomez de Castro, Ana I.
•
Barstow, Martin A.
•
Baudin, Fréderic
•
•
Bouret, Jean Claude
•
Brosch, Noah
•
•
del Zanna, Giulio
•
Evans, Chris
•
García, Miriam
•
Gaensicke, Boris
•
Kehrig, Carolina
•
Lapington, Jon
•
Lecavelier des Etangs, Alain
•
•
Nazé, Yael
•
Neiner, Coralie
•
Nichols, Jonathan
•
•
•
Rauw, Gregor
•
Shore, Steven
•
Tovmasian, Gagik
•
ud-Doula, Asif
•
France, Kevin
•
Hillenbrand, Lynne
Abstract
The investigation of the emergence of life is a major endeavour of science. Astronomy is contributing to it in three fundamental manners: (1) by measuring the chemical enrichment of the Universe, (2) by investigating planet formation and searching for exoplanets with signatures of life and, (3) by determining the abundance of aminoacids and the chemical routes to aminoacid and protein growth in astronomical bodies. This proposal deals with the first two. In the Voyage to 2050, the world-wide scientific community is getting equipped with large facilities for the investigation of the emergence of life in the Universe (i.e. VLT, JWST, ELT, GMT, TMT, ALMA, FAST, VLA, ATHENA, SKA) including the ESA's CHEOPS, PLATO and ARIEL missions. This white paper is a community effort to call for the development of a large ultraviolet optical observatory to gather fundamental data for this investigation that will not be accessible through other ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. A versatile space observatory with UV sensitivity a factor of 50-100 greater than existing facilities will revolutionize our understanding of the pathway to life in the Universe.
Ads BibCode
2019arXiv191100769G
Rights
open.access
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
1911.00769.pdf
Size
2.49 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d817caea4a64fb5e82f7b6a6543e2a45