The Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability convenes a Postgraduate module, "Habitability in the Universe", which is run by the Institute for Advance Teaching and Learning. This module is open to all postgraduates, from all disciplines, and covers the subject of habitability from myriad perspectives. More details can be found on the module's home page.

Welcome to the website of the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability (CEH) at the University of Warwick. The CEH is a cross-disciplinary research centre that draws upon expertise from departments across the university. It is a collaborative project which works with both the sciences and arts in order to consider life beyond, and on, this planet. We are a newly formed University Research Centre looking for funding to develop our research goals. Please explore our webpages, and feel free to contact us if you would like to get involved.

CEH member Richard West leads the fascinating discovery of an exoplanet that falls in the middle of what has been termed the 'Neptunian desert'. This refers to a region close-in to the parent star where previously no Neptune-sized exoplanets had been found. NGTS-4b has a mass 20 times that of the Earth and orbits its star (a 13th mag K dwarf) once every 1.34 days! What's more, it's the smallest planet discovered by a wide-field ground-based photometric survey to date - excellent work!

This study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 486, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 5094–5103

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: Richard West (lead), Daniel Bayliss, James Jackman, George King, James McCormac, Peter Wheatley, David Armstrong, Paul Chote, Ben Cooke, Emma Foxell, Boris Gänsicke, Tom Louden & Don Pollacco

Dimitri Veras leads an interdisciplinary team of astronomers and biologists in a study exploring the dynamical and biological constraints of interplanetary panspermia. This is the theory that life can hop from planet to planet via some mechanism, most likely aboard asteroids or comets.

This work was published in Astrobiology, Volume 18, Number 9

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: Dimitri Veras (lead), David Armstrong, James Blake, Jose Gutiérrez-Marcos & Hendrik Schäefer

CEH member James Jackman leads a recent study of flares in G-type stars, as observed using NGTS. The study shows that G-stars can have flares many times the energy of the Carrington event, and the primary detection is one of the largest amplitude superflares detected from a bright G star.

This work was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 477, Issue 4, p.4655-4664

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: James Jackman (lead), Peter Wheatley, Chloe Pugh, Boris Gänsicke, Anne-Marie Broomhall, David Armstrong & James McCormac