English

Habitable Zones Around Massive Stars: From the Main Sequence to Supergiants

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2026-02-17 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

Massive stars dominate the radiative and mechanical feedback of young stellar populations, yet their intense ultraviolet fields and strong winds are typically presumed to preclude Earth-like habitability. We quantify this expectation by mapping time dependent habitable zones (HZs) for solar-metallicity stars with initial masses of 0.80.8-120M120\,M_\odot. From rotating and non-rotating \textsc{GENEC} tracks we derive bolometric ``climate'' HZ boundaries and enforce XUV energy-limited escape and wind ram-pressure retention constraints for a dipole-magnetized Earth analogue. The operational inner edge is set by the most restrictive limit, and we measure the annulus lifetime, the longest continuous residence at fixed orbit, and the maximum number of dynamically packed terrestrial planets it can host. We find a sharp main-sequence ceiling: while a 9M9\,M_\odot star sustains an operational HZ for 30\sim 30~Myr at 70\sim 70-130130~AU, the main-sequence annulus becomes brief and extremely narrow by 12M12\,M_\odot and disappears by 15M15\,M_\odot. Post main-sequence evolution can reopen HZs up to 25\sim 25-30M30\,M_\odot, but only for 0.03\sim 0.03-1.51.5~Myr at hundreds to 103\sim 10^3~AU, disappearing by 40M\sim 40\,M_\odot. Rotation modestly increases habitable lifetimes near the upper main sequence without altering the high mass ceiling. Initial Mass Function (IMF) weighting shows that massive stars contribute only 104\sim 10^{-4} of the habitable planet-time budget. Even so, they still add of order a few 10510^{5} operationally habitable Earth analogues to the Milky Way at any instant. This implies that massive star systems are unlikely to dominate the Galaxy wide habitability budget, but they may still provide a set of short-lived, observationally distinct targets for biosignature searches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.13875,
  title  = {Habitable Zones Around Massive Stars: From the Main Sequence to Supergiants},
  author = {Devesh Nandal and Abraham Loeb},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.13875},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to ApJ. Comments are welcome