Characterizing Habitable Exoplanets With Interdisciplinary Expertise

The coming decades will see a huge effort devoted to searching for habitable worlds and life beyond our solar system. The next generation of observational tools such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) might, for the first time in history, be able to search for life beyond the confines of our solar system. However, the exact signature(s) we should be searching for remains a wide open and debated topic. Investigating and detecting such signatures requires input from a global cohort of exoplanet scientists, (astro)biologists, geoscientists, and telescope development teams.

In this inaugural cross disciplinary workshop we will establish a working group that combines the expertise of (1) exoplanetary scientists, (2) (astro)biologists and planetary scientists, and (3) teams developing and building the next generation telescopes including HWO and LIFE. We aim to facilitate the vital, and currently lacking, collaboration between these 3 critical pillars to explore the synergies between HWO and LIFE and determine if they can answer the age old question: Are we alone?