Related papers: Dynamical Effects on the Habitable Zone for Earth-…
Planetary obliquity and eccentricity influence climate by shaping the spatial and temporal patterns of stellar energy incident at a planet's surface, affecting both the annual mean climate and magnitude of seasonal variability. Previous…
Hot giant exoplanets are very exotic objects with no equivalent in the Solar System that allow us to study the behavior of atmospheres under extreme conditions. Their thermal and chemical day--night dichotomies associated with extreme wind…
Planets with non-zero obliquity and/or orbital eccentricity experience seasonal variations of stellar irradiation at local latitudes. The extent of the atmospheric response can be crudely estimated by the ratio between the orbital timescale…
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 present a large ensemble of simulations of an Earth-like world with increasing insolation and rotation rate. Unlike previous work utilizing idealized aquaplanet configurations we focus our simulations on modern Earth-like topography. The…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
Several observational works have shown the existence of Jupiter-mass planets covering a wide range of semi-major axes around Sun-like stars. We aim to analyse the planetary formation processes around Sun-like stars that host a Jupiter-mass…
An important property of exoplanetary systems is the extent of the Habitable Zone (HZ), defined as that region where water can exist in a liquid state on the surface of a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure. Both ground and…
The dominant paradigm in assigning "habitability"' to terrestrial planets is to define a circumstellar habitable zone: the locus of orbital radii in which the planet is neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it. One dimensional…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
The current progress in the detection of terrestrial type exoplanets has opened a new avenue in the characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres and in the search for biosignatures of life with the upcoming ground-based and space missions.…
Conventional definitions of habitability require abundant liquid surface water to exist continuously over geologic timescales. Water in each of its thermodynamic phases interacts with solar and thermal radiation and is the cause for strong…
Studying exoplanet atmospheres is essential for assessing their potential to host liquid water and their capacity to support life (their habitability). Each atmosphere uniquely influences the likelihood of surface liquid water, defining the…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) can result from dynamical scattering processes happening in the first few million years of a planetary system's life. Several models predict the possibility, for these isolated planetary-mass objects, to retain…
In this paper we discuss and illustrate the hypothesis that life substantially alters the state of a planetary environment and therefore, modifies the limits of the HZ as estimated for an uninhabited planet. This hypothesis lead to the…
The cumulative effect of the magnetized stellar winds on exoplanets dominates over other forms of star-planet interactions. When combined with photoevaporation, these winds will lead to atmospheric erosion. This is directly connected with…
Hot Jupiters are typically considered to be tidally locked due to their short orbital periods. The extreme irradiation can result in atmospheric species becoming thermally ionized on the dayside, which then interact with the planet's…
We present a time-dependent radiative model for the atmosphere of extrasolar planets that takes into account the eccentricity of their orbit. In addition to the modulation of stellar irradiation by the varying planet-star distance, the…
In this paper we investigate the detectability of a habitable-zone exomoon around various configurations of exoplanetary systems with the Kepler Mission or photometry of approximately equal quality. We calculate both the predicted transit…
The Habitable Zone for a given star describes the range of circumstellar distances from the star within which a planet could have liquid water on its surface, which depends upon the stellar properties. Here we describe the development of…