Related papers: Habitability in Different Milky Way Stellar Enviro…
Cosmic rays can penetrate planetary atmospheres driving the formation of prebiotic molecules, which are important for the origin of life. We calculate the Galactic cosmic ray fluxes in the habitable zone of five nearby, well-studied…
The Galactic habitable zone is defined as the region with highly enough metallicity to form planetary systems in which Earth-like planets could be born and might be capable of sustaining life surviving to the destructive effects of nearby…
Given the inexorable increase in the Sun's luminosity, Earth will exit the habitable zone in ~1 Gyr. There is a negligible chance that Earth's orbit will change during that time through internal Solar System dynamics. However, there is a…
The Gaia space telescope has transformed our understanding of random stellar encounters with the Solar System. This study examines how such perturbations influence the most eccentric comets in the Oort Cloud (OC), a thermalized reservoir of…
Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from…
Both simulations and observations indicate that stars form in filamentary, hierarchically clustered associations, most of which disperse into their galactic field once feedback destroys their parent clouds. However, during their early…
We present a new investigation of the habitability of the Milky Way bulge, that expands previous studies on the Galactic Habitable Zone. We discuss existing knowledge on the abundance of planets in the bulge, metallicity and the possible…
We present a comprehensive characterisation of close stellar encounters in the solar vicinity, with a particular focus on placing the predicted fly-by of GJ~710 in context. This star will come extremely close ($0.0621$\,pc or…
The habitability of a planet is influenced by both its parent star and the properties of its local stellar neighborhood. Potential threats to habitability from the local stellar environment mainly arise from two factors: cataclysmic events…
The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the…
Most stars form as part of a stellar group. These young stars are mostly surrounded by a disk from which potentially a planetary system might form. Both, the disk and later on the planetary system, may be affected by the cluster environment…
The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this…
Probable past and future close encounters of open clusters with known characteristics over 64 million years have been calculated by integrating the orbits of cluster centers in the Galactic potential using the _galpy_ package. It has been…
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…
An instability among the giant planets' orbits can match many aspects of the Solar System's current orbital architecture. We explore the possibility that this dynamical instability was triggered by the close passage of a star or substellar…
Aims. We estimate the dynamical evolution of the Globular Clusters interaction with the Galactic centre that dynamically changed in the past. Methods. We simulated the orbits of 147 globular clusters over 10 Gyr lookback time using the…
The stars that populate the solar neighbourhood were formed in stellar clusters. Through N-body simulations of these clusters, we measure the rate of close encounters between stars. By monitoring the interaction histories of each star, we…
Stellar flybys in star clusters are suspected to affect the orbital architecture of planetary systems causing eccentricity excitation and orbital misalignment between the planet orbit and the equatorial plane of the star. We explore whether…
Stars do not form in isolation but together with other stars, and often in a clustered environment. Depending on the initial conditions in these environments, such as initial density and substructure, the distances of encounters between…
Recent numerical simulations have demonstrated that the Sun's dynamical history within the Milky Way may be much more complex than that suggested by its current low peculiar velocity. In particular, the Sun may have radially migrated…