Related papers: Hydrogen Greenhouse Planets Beyond the Habitable Z…
Sub-Neptunes represent the current frontier of exoplanet atmospheric characterisation. A proposed subset, Hycean planets, would have liquid water oceans and be potentially habitable, but there are many unanswered questions about their…
Oxygen isotopes in marine cherts have been used to infer hot oceans during the Archean with temperatures between 60{\deg}C (333 K) and 80{\deg}C (353 K). Such climates are challenging for the early Earth warmed by the faint young Sun. The…
The K2-33 planetary system hosts one transiting ~5 R_E planet orbiting the young M-type host star. The planet's mass is still unknown, with an estimated upper limit of 5.4 M_J. The extreme youth of the system (<20 Myr) gives the…
The presence of valleys on ancient terrains of Mars suggest that liquid water flowed on the martian surface 3.8 billion years ago or before. The above-freezing temperatures required to explain valley formation could have been transient, in…
Exoplanets orbiting M dwarfs present a valuable opportunity for their detection and atmospheric characterisation. This is evident from recent inferences of H$_2$O in such atmospheres, including that of the habitable-zone exoplanet K2-18b.…
Hycean planets are hypothetical exoplanets characterized by $H_2O$ oceans and $H_2$-rich atmospheres. These planets are high-priority targets for biosignature searches, as they combine abundant surface liquid water with easy-to-characterize…
We investigate the chemical stability of CO2-dominated atmospheres of desiccated M dwarf terrestrial exoplanets using a 1-dimensional photochemical model. Around Sun-like stars, CO2 photolysis by Far-UV (FUV) radiation is balanced by…
Rocky planet atmospheres form and evolve through interactions between the planet's surface and interior. If a growing rocky planet acquires enough mass prior to the dissipation of the nebular gas disk, it can gravitationally capture a…
Planets in the "Habitable Zones" around M-type stars are important targets for characterization in future observations. Due to tidal-locking in synchronous spin-orbit rotations, the planets tend to have a hot dayside and a cold nightside.…
A recent observation of the exoplanet K2-18b sparked interest among scientists - large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane were detected in an H2-rich background atmosphere. If the planet is a hycean world (liquid water ocean +…
The atmospheric chemical composition of a hot Jupiter can lead to insights into where in its natal protoplanetary disk it formed and its subsequent migration pathway. We use a 1-D chemical kinetics code to compute a suite of models across a…
We demonstrate that the extension of the Habitable Zone (HZ) due to the presence of liquid water on the night side of tidally locked planets, modelled in this and earlier works, significantly increases the number of potentially habitable…
We investigate the ability of primordial gas clouds to retain molecular hydrogen (H_2) during the initial phase of the reionization epoch. We find that before the Stromgren spheres of the individual ionizing sources overlap, the UV…
The thermochemistry of H2 and HD in non-collapsed, non-reionized primordial gas up to the end of the dark age is investigated with recent radiation-matter and chemical reaction rates taking into account the efficient coolant HD, and the…
Stable, hydrogen-burning, M dwarf stars comprise about 75% of all stars in the Galaxy. They are extremely long-lived and because they are much smaller in mass than the Sun (between 0.5 and 0.08 MSun), their temperature and stellar…
Gl581d has a minimum mass of 7 MEarth and is the first detected potentially habitable rocky Super-Earth. Our models confirm that a habitable atmosphere can exist on Gl581d. We derive spectroscopic features for atmospheres, assuming an…
With recent advances in exoplanet observational techniques enabling the discovery of increasingly smaller planets, a crucial question emerges in the search for habitable planets: how small can a planet be and still maintain an atmosphere?…
Photochemical hazes are expected to form and significantly contribute to the chemical and radiative balance of exoplanets with relatively moderate temperatures, possibly in the habitable zone of their host star. In the presence of humidity,…
Radial velocity monitoring has found the signature of a $M \sin i = 1.3$~M$_\oplus$ planet located within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of Proxima Centauri \citep{Anglada16}. Despite a hotter past and an active host star the planet Proxima~b…
White and brown dwarfs are astrophysical objects that are bright enough to support an insolation habitable zone (IHZ). Unlike hydrogen-burning stars, they cool and become less luminous with time, and hence their IHZ moves in with time. The…