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The revolutionary discovery of thousands of confirmed and candidate planets beyond the solar system brings forth the most fundamentalquestion: How do planets and their host stars form and evolve? Protostars and Planets VI brings together more than 250 contributing authors at the forefront of their field, conveying the latest results in this research area and establishing a new foundation for advancing our understanding of stellar and planetary formation.Continuing the tradition of the Protostars and Planets series, this latest volume uniquely integrates the cross-disciplinary aspects of this broad field. Covering an extremely wide range of scales, from the formation of large clouds in our Milky Way galaxy down to small chondrules in our solar system, Protostars and Planets VI takes an encompassing view with the goal of not only highlighting what we know but, most importantly, emphasizing the frontiers of what we do not know.As a vehicle for propelling forward new discoveries on stars, planets, and their origins, this latest volume in the Space Science Series is an indispensable resource for both current scientists and new students in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, and the study of meteorites.

The TDE focus group seeks to understand how disequilibria are generated in geological, chemical and biological systems, and how these disequilibria can lead to emergent phenomena, such as self-organization in bounded conditions eventuating in metabolism. Some planetary water-rock interfaces generate electrochemical disequilibria (e.g. electron, proton and/or ion gradients), and life itself is an out-of-equilibrium system that operates by harnessing such gradients across membranes. Disequilibrium in inorganic chemical systems also leads to the formation of a variety of patterns, structures, and dynamical systems. Understanding geochemical far-from-equilibrium systems and bounded self-organizing processes may be instructive in revealing some of the processes behind lifes origin. In this workshop paper we will detail the outcomes of the 8th TDE meeting in Tokyo, summarizing the focus groups discussions regarding 1) the determination of some of the required conditions for generating geochemical disequilibria for life to originate on a wet, rocky world; 2) the spatial and temporal scales for the origin of life;3) lifes use of disequilibria and the relationship of life itself to self-organizing systems in an aqueous inorganic milieu; and 4) pathways forward for achieving the laboratory simulation of far-from-equilibrium systems concerning prebiotic chemical processes.

Europe is also the base of a flourishing exoplanet research community, building on the first discoveries made by European researchers. [...]after more than two decades of research and discussion European Astrobiology has ‘come of age’ and in 2016 will launch its Astrobiology roadmap (www.astromap.eu) which complements that of NASA (astrobiology.nasa.gov/roadmap) and provides a vision for Europe to be a leader in this still new and emerging discipline. ‘First evidence on the role of heavy ions irradiation of meteorites and formamide in the origin of biomolecules’ and the theoretical analysis on ‘Proton-induced Collisions on Potential Prebiotic Species’ by Bacchus-Montabonel. Planets, Tracing the Transfer, Origin, Preservation, and Evolution of their Reservoirs’ a programme to explore habitability in our solar system http://iuap-planet-topers.oma.be. Since Earth provides our only example of a confirmed inhabited planet, the question of how prebiotic molecules assembled to form self-replicating macromolecular systems and how life itself was then able to evolve are central to Astrobiology.