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The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme conditions is key to determine the ‘edges’ of the habitable zone. Additionally understanding the behaviour of a temperature limited biosphere will help towards formulating biosignature predictions for alien life living under conditions very different to those on Earth. Towards this aim, we extend the ‘ExoGaia Model’ – an abstract model of microbial life living on a highly simplified zero-dimensional planet. Via their metabolisms, microbes influence the atmospheric composition and therefore the temperature of the planet and emergent feedback loops allow microbes to regulate their climate and maintain long-term habitability. Here, we adapt the ExoGaia model to include temperature adaptation of the microbes by allowing different species to have different temperature ‘preferences’. We find that rather than adapting towards the planet’s abiotic conditions the biosphere tends to more strongly influence the climate of its planet, suggesting that the surface temperature of an inhabited planet might be significantly different from that predicted using abiotic models. We find that the success rate for microbial establishment on planets is improved when adaptation is allowed. However, planetary abiotic context is important for determining whether overall survival prospects for life will be improved or degraded. These results indicate the necessity to develop an understanding of life living under different limiting regimes to form predictions for the boundaries of the habitable zone.

We investigate the impact of clouds on the atmosphere of GJ~1214b using the radiatively-coupled, phase-equilibrium cloud model {\sc EddySed} coupled to the {\sc Unified Model} general circulation model. We find that, consistent with previous investigations, high metallicity ($100\times$ solar) and clouds with large vertical extents (a sedimentation factor of $f_\mathrm{sed} = 0.1$) are required to best match the observations, although metallicities even higher than those investigated here may be required to improve agreement further. We additionally find that in our case which best matches the observations ($f_\mathrm{sed}=0.1$), the velocity structures change relative to the clear sky case with the formation of a superrotating jet being suppressed, although further investigation is required to understand the cause of the suppression. The increase in cloud extent with $f_\mathrm{sed}$ results in a cooler planet due to a higher albedo, causing the atmosphere to contract. This also results in a reduced day-night contrast seen in the phase curves, although the introduction of cloud still results in a reduction of the phase offset. We additionally investigate the impact the the {\sc Unified Model}'s pseudo-spherical irradiation scheme on the calculation of heating rates, finding that the introduction of nightside shortwave heating results in slower mid-latitude jets compared to the plane parallel irradiation scheme used in previous works. We also consider the impact of a gamma distribution, as opposed to a log-normal distribution, for the distribution of cloud particle radii and find the impact to be relatively minor., Accepted to MNRAS

Methane is thought to have been an important greenhouse gas during the Archean, although its potential warming has been found to be limited at high concentrations due to its high shortwave absorption. We use the Met Office Unified Model, a general circulation model, to further explore the climatic effect of different Archean methane concentrations. Surface warming peaks at a pressure ratio CH$_4$:CO$_2$ of approximately 0.1, reaching a maximum of up to 7 K before significant cooling above this ratio. Equator-to-pole temperature differences also tend to increase up to pCH$_4$ $\leq$300 Pa, which is driven by a difference in radiative forcing at the equator and poles by methane and a reduction in the latitudinal extend of the Hadley circulation. 3D models are important to fully capture the cooling effect of methane, due to these impacts of the circulation., 36 pages, 18 figures

Measuring the metallicity and carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio in exoplanet atmospheres is a fundamental step towards constraining the dominant chemical processes at work and, if in equilibrium, revealing planet formation histories. Transmission spectroscopy provides the necessary means by constraining the abundances of oxygen- and carbon-bearing species; however, this requires broad wavelength coverage, moderate spectral resolution, and high precision that, together, are not achievable with previous observatories. Now that JWST has commenced science operations, we are able to observe exoplanets at previously uncharted wavelengths and spectral resolutions. Here we report time-series observations of the transiting exoplanet WASP-39b using JWST's Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam). The long-wavelength spectroscopic and short-wavelength photometric light curves span 2.0 - 4.0 $\mu$m, exhibit minimal systematics, and reveal well-defined molecular absorption features in the planet's spectrum. Specifically, we detect gaseous H$_2$O in the atmosphere and place an upper limit on the abundance of CH$_4$. The otherwise prominent CO$_2$ feature at 2.8 $\mu$m is largely masked by H$_2$O. The best-fit chemical equilibrium models favour an atmospheric metallicity of 1-100$\times$ solar (i.e., an enrichment of elements heavier than helium relative to the Sun) and a sub-stellar carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio. The inferred high metallicity and low C/O ratio may indicate significant accretion of solid materials during planet formation or disequilibrium processes in the upper atmosphere., Comment: 35 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, Nature, accepted

Transmission spectroscopy provides insight into the atmospheric properties and consequently the formation history, physics, and chemistry of transiting exoplanets. However, obtaining precise inferences of atmospheric properties from transmission spectra requires simultaneously measuring the strength and shape of multiple spectral absorption features from a wide range of chemical species. This has been challenging given the precision and wavelength coverage of previous observatories. Here, we present the transmission spectrum of the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b obtained using the SOSS mode of the NIRISS instrument on the JWST. This spectrum spans $0.6 - 2.8 \mu$m in wavelength and reveals multiple water absorption bands, the potassium resonance doublet, as well as signatures of clouds. The precision and broad wavelength coverage of NIRISS-SOSS allows us to break model degeneracies between cloud properties and the atmospheric composition of WASP-39b, favoring a heavy element enhancement ("metallicity") of $\sim 10 - 30 \times$ the solar value, a sub-solar carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio, and a solar-to-super-solar potassium-to-oxygen (K/O) ratio. The observations are best explained by wavelength-dependent, non-gray clouds with inhomogeneous coverage of the planet's terminator., Comment: 48 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Under review at Nature

With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might indicate alien life we must understand the abiotic characteristics of a planet and how life interacts with its environment. In the field of biogeochemistry, sophisticated models of life-environment coupled systems demonstrate that many assumptions specific to Earth-based life, e.g. specific ATP maintenance costs, are unnecessary to accurately model a biosphere. We explore a simple model of a single-species microbial biosphere that produces CH4 as a byproduct of the microbes' energy extraction - known as a type I biosignature. We demonstrate that although significantly changing the biological parameters has a large impact on the biosphere's total population, such changes have only a minimal impact on the strength of the resulting biosignature, while the biosphere is limited by H2 availability. We extend the model to include more accurate microbial energy harvesting and show that adjusting microbe parameters can lead to a regime change where the biosphere becomes limited by energy availability and no longer fully exploits the available H2, impacting the strength of the resulting biosignature. We demonstrate that, for a nutrient limited biosphere, identifying the limiting nutrient, understanding the abiotic processes that control its abundance, and determining the biosphere's ability to exploit it, are more fundamental for making type I biosignature predictions than the details of the population dynamics of the biosphere., 18 pages, 17 figures

Stellar flares present challenges to the potential habitability of terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarf stars through inducing changes in the atmospheric composition and irradiating the planet's surface in large amounts of ultraviolet light. To examine their impact, we have coupled a general circulation model with a photochemical kinetics scheme to examine the response and changes of an Earth-like atmosphere to stellar flares and coronal mass ejections. We find that stellar flares increase the amount of ozone in the atmosphere by a factor of 20 compared to a quiescent star. We find that coronal mass ejections abiotically generate significant levels of potential bio-signatures such as N$_2$O. The changes in atmospheric composition cause a moderate decrease in the amount of ultraviolet light that reaches the planets surface, suggesting that while flares are potentially harmful to life, the changes in the atmosphere due to a stellar flare act to reduce the impact of the next stellar flare., Comment: 27 pages, 21 figures, accepted to MNRAS