Papers › Bioverse: A Comprehensive Assessment of the Capabilities of Extremely Large Telescopes...
Bioverse: A Comprehensive Assessment of the Capabilities of Extremely Large Telescopes to Probe Earth-like O₂ Levels in Nearby Transiting Habitable Zone Exoplanets
Kevin K. Hardegree-Ullman, Dániel Apai, Galen J. Bergsten, Ilaria Pascucci, Mercedes López-Morales
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Molecular oxygen is a strong indicator of life on Earth, and may indicate biological processes on exoplanets too. Recent studies proposed that Earth-like O₂ levels might be detectable on nearby exoplanets using high-resolution spectrographs on future extremely large telescopes (ELTs). However, these studies did not consider constraints like relative velocities, planet occurrence rates, and target observability. We expanded on past studies by creating a homogeneous catalog of 286,391 main-sequence stars within 120 pc using Gaia DR3, and used the Bioverse framework to simulate the likelihood of finding nearby transiting Earth analogs. We also simulated a survey of M dwarfs within 20 pc accounting for η_⊕ estimates, transit probabilities, relative velocities, and target observability to determine how long ELTs and theoretical 50-100 meter ground-based telescopes need to observe to probe for Earth-like O₂ levels with an R=100,000 spectrograph. This would only be possible within 50 years for up to ∼21% of nearby M dwarf systems if a suitable transiting habitable zone Earth-analog was discovered, assuming signals from every observable partial transit from each ELT can be combined. If so, Earth-like O₂ levels could be detectable on TRAPPIST-1 d-g within 16 to 55 years, respectively, and about half that time with an R=500,000 spectrograph. These results have important implications for whether ELTs can survey nearby habitable zone Earth analogs for O₂ via transmission spectroscopy. Our work provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the ground-based capabilities to search for life beyond the solar system.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections