Related papers: Habitable Climates
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…
The notion of a Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), or regions of the Milky Way galaxy that preferentially maintain the conditions to sustain complex life, has recently gained attention due to the detection of numerous exoplanets and advances…
Planetary rotation rate has a significant effect on atmospheric circulation, where the strength of the Coriolis effect in part determines the efficiency of latitudinal heat transport, altering cloud distributions, surface temperatures, and…
Evidence from the solar system suggests that, unlike Venus and Mars, the presence of a strong magnetic dipole moment on Earth has helped maintain liquid water on its surface. Therefore, planetary magnetism could have a significant effect on…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
The habitable zone is the main tool that mission architectures utilize to select potentially habitable planets for follow up spectroscopic observation. Given its importance, the precise size and location of the habitable zone remains a hot…
In this study, we treat Earth as an exoplanet and investigate our home planet by means of a potential future mid-infrared (MIR) space mission called the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). We combine thermal spectra from an…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
Many planetary parameters impact the climate state of Earth-like exoplanets and could vary significantly from those on Earth. However, some of these parameters may be impossible to observe, causing ambiguity in determining exoplanet climate…
With the detection of extrasolar moons (exomoons) on the horizon, it is important to consider their potential for habitability. If we consider the circumstellar Habitable Zone (HZ, often described in terms of planet semi-major axis and…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
The recent discovery and initial characterization of sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets that receive stellar irradiance of approximately Earth's raised the prospect of finding habitable planets in the coming decade, because some of these…
Vegetation can modify the planetary surface albedo via the Charney mechanism, as plants are usually darker than the bare surface of the continents. We updated ESTM (Earth-like Surface Temperature Model) to incorporate the presence,…
Our knowledge of planets' orbital dynamics, which was based on Solar System studies, has been challenged by the diversity of exoplanetary systems. Around cool and ultra cool dwarfs, the influence of tides on the orbital and spin evolution…
Coupled models of mantle thermal evolution, volcanism, outgassing, weathering, and climate evolution for Earth-like (in terms of size and composition) stagnant lid planets are used to assess their prospects for habitability. The results…
In recent years, numerical models that were developed for Earth have been adapted to study exoplanetary climates to understand how the broad range of possible exoplanetary properties affects their climate state. The recent discovery and…
Small rocky planets, as well as larger planets that suffered extensive volatile loss, tend to be drier and have thinner atmospheres as compared to Earth. Such planets probably outnumber worlds better endowed with volatiles, being the most…
An increasing number of potentially habitable terrestrial planets and planet candidates are found by ongoing planet search programs. The search for atmospheric signatures to establish planetary habitability and the presence of life might be…
Exoplanet detection in the past decade by efforts including NASA's Kepler and TESS missions has discovered many worlds that differ substantially from planets in our own Solar System, including more than 150 exoplanets orbiting binary or…