Physical constraints on the likelihood of life on exoplanets
Abstract
One of the most fundamental questions in exoplanetology is to determine whether a given planet is habitable. We estimate the relative likelihood of a planet's propensity towards habitability by considering key physical characteristics such as the role of temperature on ecological and evolutionary processes, and atmospheric losses via hydrodynamic escape and stellar wind erosion. From our analysis, we demonstrate that Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone around M-dwarfs seemingly display much lower prospects of being habitable relative to Earth, owing to the higher incident ultraviolet fluxes and closer distances to the host star. We illustrate our results by specifically computing the likelihood (of supporting life) for the recently discovered exoplanets, Proxima b and TRAPPIST-1e, which we find to be several orders of magnitude smaller than that of Earth.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.02996,
title = {Physical constraints on the likelihood of life on exoplanets},
author = {Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.02996},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
published in International Journal of Astrobiology; 31 pages; 3 figures