Our Contribution
APL leads NASA’s Consortium on Habitability and Atmospheres of M-dwarf Planets, or CHAMPs — an interdisciplinary research team supporting NASA’s pursuit to understand how life began and whether it has evolved on worlds beyond our solar system. The team is working to answer a broad question in astrobiology: Can the rocky planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common stars in our galaxy, support life? And if so, how do we best characterize them?
Launched in 2020 through NASA’s Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) program, CHAMPs unites more than two dozen experts in planet formation, atmospheric chemistry, stellar atmospheres, and exoplanet observations. Together, they are harnessing the capabilities of current and future space telescopes — including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — to observe and characterize these nearby M-dwarf exoplanets, while building models that predict what habitable conditions might look like and what biosignatures could reveal life on these worlds.
Led by APL’s Kevin Stevenson and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Ravi Kopparapu, the consortium has already showcased Webb’s extraordinary capabilities for exoplanet research through thousands of hours of awarded observation time. Their work has yielded landmark results in red dwarf exoplanet science, including the first exoplanet confirmed by Webb and the validation of a novel technique that can detect and characterize exoplanets that never pass in front of their stars.
CHAMPs’ models seek to map where and how these planets form and evolve, what biological signatures to expect, and which physical conditions most influence habitability. The results could be the most realistic and comprehensive simulations of M-dwarf rocky worlds to date, and could give the scientific community a sharper set of tools to rapidly characterize these distant worlds in the search for life beyond Earth.
