Related papers: Habitable Climates: The Influence of Eccentricity
We use a one-dimensional (1-D) cloud-free climate model to estimate habitable zone (HZ) boundaries for terrestrial planets of masses 0.1 M$_{E}$ and 5 M$_{E}$ around circumbinary stars of various spectral type combinations. Specifically, we…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
The late phases of the orbital evolution of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star are revisited considering the effect of the density fluctuations associated with convective motions inside the star. Such fluctuations produce a random…
Relatively long-period nonsynchronized planets---such as warm Jupiters---potentially retain the primordial rotation, eccentricity, and obliquity that might encapsulate information on planetary climate and formation processes. To date, there…
Determining planetary habitability is a complex matter, as the interplay between a planet's physical and atmospheric properties with stellar insolation has to be studied in a self consistent manner. Standardized atmospheric models for…
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…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…
Observations of exoplanets have revealed that systems with planets on closely-spaced orbits are common, which motivates the question "How closely can planets orbit to one another and still be dynamically-stable for very long times?". To…
Orbital forcing plays a key role in pacing the glacial-interglacial cycles. However, the mechanistic linkages between the orbital parameters - eccentricity, obliquity, and precession - and global ice volume remain unclear. Here, we…
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…
For a hypothetical planet on a highly eccentric orbit, we have calculated the osculating orbital parameters and its closest approaches to Earth and Moon over a period of 750 kyr. The approaches which are close enough to influence the…
Various climate states at high obliquity are realized for a range of stellar irradiance using a dynamical atmosphere-ocean-sea ice climate model in an Aquaplanet configuration. Three stable climate states are obtained that differ in the…
The Kepler Space telescope has uncovered around thirteen circumbinary planets (CBPs) that orbit a pair of stars and experience two sources of stellar flux. We characterize the top-of-atmosphere flux and surface temperature evolution in…
The internal thermal and magnetic evolution of rocky exoplanets is critical to their habitability. We focus on the thermal-orbital evolution of Earth-mass planets around low mass M stars whose radiative habitable zone overlaps with the…
The ice-albedo feedback on rapidly-rotating terrestrial planets in the habitable zone can lead to abrupt transitions (bifurcations) between a warm and a snowball (ice-covered) state, bistability between these states, and hysteresis in…
Planetary atmospheric energy budgets primarily depend on stellar incident flux. However, stellar variability can have major consequences for the evolution of planetary climates. In this work, we evaluate how stellar variability influences…
Moons orbiting extrasolar planets are the next class of object to be observed and characterized for possible habitability. Like the host-planets to their host-star, exomoons have a limiting radius at which they may be gravitationally bound,…
Many habitable zone exoplanets are expected to form with water mass fractions higher than that of the Earth. For rocky exoplanets with 10-1000x Earth's H2O but without H2, we model the multi-Gyr evolution of ocean temperature and chemistry,…
We analyzed the thermodynamics of hypothetical exoplanets at very low Keplerian circular orbits in close vicinity of rapidly spinning supermassive black holes. Such black hole exoplanets are heated by strongly blueshifted and focused flux…