Related papers: Spectrum-driven Planetary Deglaciation Due to Incr…
Transmission spectra are differential measurements that utilize stellar illumination to probe transiting exoplanet atmospheres. Any spectral difference between the illuminating light source and the disk-integrated stellar spectrum due to…
All water-covered rocky planets in the inner habitable zones of solar-type stars will inevitably experience a catastrophic runaway climate due to increasing stellar luminosity and limits to outgoing infrared radiation from wet greenhouse…
A long-standing issue in astrobiology is whether planets orbiting the most abundant type of stars, M-dwarfs, can support liquid water and eventually life. A new study shows that subglacial melting may provide an answer, significantly…
Using data from the California-Kepler-Survey (CKS) we study trends in planetary properties with host star metallicity for close-in planets. By incorporating knowledge of the properties of the planetary radius gap identified by the CKS…
Detection of an atmosphere around a terrestrial exoplanet will be a major milestone in the field, but our observational capacities are biased towards to tidally locked, close-in planets orbiting M-dwarf stars. The atmospheres of these…
Coupled models of mantle thermal evolution, volcanism, outgassing, weathering, and climate evolution for Earth-like (in terms of size and composition) stagnant lid planets are used to assess their prospects for habitability. The results…
We propose a general principle that under the radiative-convective equilibrium, the spatial and temporal variations in a planet's surface and atmosphere tend to increase its cooling. This principle is based on Jensen's inequality and the…
We generalize the theory of the inhomogeneity effect to enable comparison among different inhomogeneous planets. A metric of inhomogeneity based on the cumulative distribution function is applied to investigate the dependence of planetary…
(abridged) Search for planets around main-sequence (MS) stars more massive than the Sun is hindered by their hot and rapidly spinning atmospheres. This obstacle has been sidestepped by radial-velocity surveys of those stars on their post-MS…
The effect of enhanced UV irradiation associated with stellar flares on the atmospheric composition and temperature of gas giant exoplanets was investigated. This was done using a 1D radiative-convective-chemical model with self-consistent…
In this study, we compare two analytic energy balance models with explicit dependence on obliquity to study the likelihood of different stable ice configurations. We compare the results of models with different methods of heat transport and…
The ongoing discoveries of extrasolar planets are unveiling a wide range of terrestrial mass (size) planets around their host stars. In this letter, we present estimates of habitable zones (HZs) around stars with stellar effective…
While the planet-metallicity correlation for FGK main-sequence stars hosting giant planets is well established, the results are not so clear for M-dwarf stars, for which precise metallicity measurements are not straightforward. However, new…
We present numerical simulations of planetary systems in star clusters with different initial stellar densities, to investigate the impact of the density on debris disc dynamics. We use LPS+ to combine N-body codes NBODY6++GPU and REBOUND…
Cold debris disks trace the limits of planet formation or migration in the outer regions of planetary systems, and thus have the potential to answer many of the outstanding questions in wide-orbit planet formation and evolution. We…
Since giant planets scatter planetesimals within a few tidal radii of their orbits, the locations of existing planetesimal belts indicate regions where giant planet formation failed in bygone protostellar disks. Infrared observations of…
Before about 500 million years ago, most probably our planet experienced temporary snowball conditions, with continental and sea ices covering a large fraction of its surface. This points to a potential bistability of Earth's climate, that…
The Sun is depleted in refractory elements compared to nearby solar twins, which may be linked to the formation of giant or terrestrial planets. Here we present high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectroscopic data for 17 solar-like…
Earth-scale planets in the classical habitable zone (HZ) are more likely to be habitable if they possess active geophysics. Without a constant internal energy source, planets cool as they age, eventually terminating tectonic activity and…
Atmospheric temperature and mixing ratio profiles of terrestrial planets vary with the spectral energy flux distribution for different types of M-dwarf stars and the planetary gravity. We investigate the resulting effects on the spectral…