Professor Amri Wandel is an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focused on supermassive black holes and active galaxies. Later, his research concentrated on life in space and exoplanets. “Astrophysics and Life in the Universe” became his flagship undergraduate course, which he developed and taught for 25 years to thousands of students. This is also the title of the previous textbook he authored in this series. Later, he added the course “Astrobiology and Life in the Universe,” adapted for the humanities, which became a series of public lectures available on YouTube. Alongside scientific research articles, he writes for popular science magazines and is frequently interviewed by the media on topics of astronomy and astrobiology. He has worked at universities in New York, Princeton, Maryland, and Stanford in the USA, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and has taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He serves as the president of the Israeli Society for Astrobiology and the Source of Life (ILASOL) and is a member of the Minerva Center for the Planetary Emergence of Life. He has published several astronomy books and over one hundred scientific articles. This year, his comprehensive textbook was released by Springer Nature, together with Professor Joseph Gale: Life in Space: Astrobiology for Non-Scientists, which colleagues have described as the most comprehensive and up-to-date astrobiology textbook.

Over the past two decades, new technology and space missions have profoundly changed our understanding of potential life beyond Earth. The resulting field, astrobiology, has become a multidisciplinary pursuit, encompassing many of the natural sciences and having implications for almost all other fields of study. Life in Space: Astrobiology for Non-Scientists, provides an introduction and overview of astrobiology. It covers a wide range of fields, from searching for signs of life on planets in our own solar system to discovering planets in distant solar systems and assessing their potential for life. The book is based on the courses of the same name that the author taught for more than two decades at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the course recorded on YouTube in the university’s prestigious Cornerstones program. The book is accessible not only to students of natural sciences, but to any reader who wants to know and understand the fascinating possibility of the existence and finding of life on other worlds.

A Hebrew edition of this book, אסטרופיזיקה והחיים ביקום, was published in 2025 by Academon (Magnus Press, Hebrew University of Jerusalem).