Related papers: Assessing Circumbinary Habitable Zones using Latit…
The habitable fraction of a planet's surface is important for the detectability of surface biosignatures. The extent and distribution of habitable areas is influenced by external parameters that control the planet's climate, atmospheric…
During the post-main sequence phase of stellar evolution the orbital distance of the habitable zone, which allows for liquid surface water on terrestrial planets, moves out past the system's original frost line, providing an opportunity for…
Understanding the surface and atmospheric conditions of Earth-size, rocky planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of low-mass stars is currently one of the greatest astronomical endeavors. Knowledge of the planetary effective surface…
We use a simple organism lifecycle model to explore the viability of an atmospheric habitable zone (AHZ), with temperatures that could support Earth-centric life, which sits above an environment that does not support life. To illustrate our…
The detection of moons orbiting extrasolar planets ("exomoons") has now become feasible. Once they are discovered in the circumstellar habitable zone, questions about their habitability will emerge. Exomoons are likely to be tidally locked…
Terrestrial planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of low-mass stars and cool dwarfs have received significant scrutiny recently because their shorter orbital periods increase their chances of detection and characterization compared to…
A key component of characterizing multi-planet exosystems is testing the orbital stability based on the observed properties. Such characterization not only tests the validity of how observations are interpreted but can also place additional…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
We present an analysis on the detection viability of refraction effects in Kepler's exoplanet atmospheres using binning techniques for their light curves in order to compare against simulated refraction effects. We split the Kepler…
Implicit in the definition of the classical circumstellar habitable zone (HZ) is the hypothesis that the carbonate-silicate cycle can maintain clement climates on exoplanets with land and surface water across a range of instellations by…
In this study we investigated the interiors of rocky exoplanets in order to identify those that may have large quantities of water. We modelled the interiors of 28 rocky exoplanets, assuming four different layers - an iron core, a rock…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
Since low-mass stars have low luminosities, orbits at which liquid water can exist on Earth-sized planets are relatively close-in, which produces Doppler signals that are detectable using state-of-the-art Doppler spectroscopy. GJ 667C is…
High contrast imaging searches for exoplanets have been conducted on 2.4-10 m telescopes, typically at H band (1.6 microns) and used exposure times of ~1 hr to search for planets with semi-major axes of > ~10 AU. We are beginning to plan…
Several studies, observational and theoretical, suggest that planetary systems with only rocky planets should be the most common in the Universe. We study the diversity of planetary systems that might form around Sun-like stars in low-mass…
Recently, a number of planets orbiting binary stars have been discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In a few systems the planets reside close to the dynamical stability limit. Due to the difficulty of forming planets in such close…
In the outer regions of the habitable zone, the risk of transitioning into a globally frozen "snowball" state poses a threat to the habitability of planets with the capacity to host water-based life. We use a one-dimensional energy balance…
The recent detection of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, Trappist-1 and many other nearby M-type stars has led to speculations, whether liquid water and life actually exist on these planets. To a large extent,…
The climate of a terrestrial exoplanet is controlled by the type of host star, the orbital configuration and the characteristics of the atmosphere and the surface. Many rocky exoplanets have higher eccentricities than those in the Solar…
It is shown that several habitability conditions (in fact, at least seven such conditions) appear to be fulfilled automatically by circumbinary planets of main-sequence stars (CBP-MS), whereas on Earth these conditions are fulfilled only by…