While speculation about life beyond the Earth has attracted the imaginations of many a human who asked “big questions”, astrobiology, as a scientific subject, is a relatively new field of active research inspired by scientific advances in astrophysics, molecular biology, ecology, and a variety of other scientific disciplines. As such, it is truly an interdisciplinary subject, combining and requiring the expertise of a wide range of researchers and thinkers.

This text is aimed to serve as an introduction to the subject for students who are just starting out on their exploration of scientific topics. The authors would like to acknowledge the work of Jeffrey O. Bennett and Seth Shostak whose standard textbook Life in the Universe served partially as an inspiration for this text. Bennett and Shostak’s work remains one of the best introductions to this topic available.

However, the mission of the authors of this work is to address inequities present in higher education, therefore we believe that the traditional textbook publishing models, proprietary licenses, and their associated costs for students and faculty needs disrupting. We are therefore pleased to adopt an Open Educational Resources (OER) model in providing a text that is free to use, copy, distribute, share and modify under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA).

As in the case of scientific progress, we stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to OER materials relating to astrobiology. We have incorporated material from Debra Fischer and Lily Zhao’s Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe, published under a CC-BY-SA license with attribution to their work whenever it was used. Additionally, we are grateful for the amazing resources available from the OpenStax’s library and have indicated our use of attributed text from their Astronomy, Chemistry and Biology textbooks.

About the Authors

Allyson Sheffield is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) and a Guest Researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. After receiving her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, she was a Visiting Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vassar College, where she first began teaching Astrobiology. She was a Science Fellow at Columbia University for four years before she came to LaGuardia CC. She is deeply involved in undergraduate research at CUNY through AstroCom NYC, where she mentors students working on Galactic archaeology and stellar streams. She will serve as the Director of the CUNY M.S. in Astrophysics Program for the 2024-2025 academic year. 

Joshua Tan is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) and a Research Associate in the Astrophysics Department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. After receiving his PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University, he was a Visiting Professor of Physics at Saint Lawrence University prior to taking a three-year Chilean Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in astrophysics hosted at Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. He is secretary of the CUNYAstro Group which connects astronomy students, faculty, researchers across the 25 CUNY campuses and has authored research papers on topics as varied as neutron stars, exoplanets, microbiology, and pedagogical approaches using Open Educational Resources.

Lily Ling Zhao is a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute in New York City.  Zhao received bachelors’ degrees in biology, mathematics, and physics from the University of Chicago and her PhD in Astronomy from Yale University.  Her research currently focuses on advancing precision spectroscopy with a focus on dynamical discovery and characterization of lower-mass exoplanets