Related papers: Age Aspects of Habitability
The circumstellar habitable zone and its various refinements serves as a useful entry point for discussing the potential for a planet to generate and sustain life. But little attention is paid to the quality of available energy in the form…
As of late 2025 there are about 70 exoplanets that meet the formal criterion of having equilibrium temperatures allowing the presence of liquid water and about 50 of them orbit M-stars, known for their strong chromospheric activity. Most of…
As a contribution to the study of the habitability of extrasolar planets, we implemented a 1-D Energy Balance Model (EBM), the simplest seasonal model of planetary climate, with new prescriptions for most physical quantities. Here we apply…
Over 300 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been detected orbiting nearby stars. We now hope to conduct a census of all planets around nearby stars and to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces with spectroscopy. Rocky planets within…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
By now, observations of exoplanets have found more than 50 binary star systems hosting 71 planets. We expect these numbers to increase as more than 70% of the main sequence stars in the solar neighborhood are members of binary or multiple…
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere…
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…
Approximately 60 percent of all stars in the solar neighbourhood (up to 80 percent in our Milky Way) are members of binary or multiple star systems. This fact led to the speculations that many more planets may exist in binary systems than…
This paper reviews habitability conditions for a terrestrial planet from the point of view of geosciences. It addresses how interactions between the interior of a planet or a moon and its atmosphere and surface (including hydrosphere and…
Stellar activity and planetary atmospheric properties have the potential to strongly influence habitability. To date, neither have been adequately studied in the multiverse context, so there has been no assessment of how these effects…
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
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…
Earth is the only known inhabited planet in the universe to date. However, advancements in the fields of astrobiology and observational astronomy, and the discovery of large varieties of extremophiles with extraordinary capablities to…
As the only known habitable (and inhabited) planet in the universe, Earth informs our search for life elsewhere. Future telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will soon look for life on rocky worlds around Sun-like stars, so…
Life has had a dramatic impact on the composition of Earth's atmosphere over time, which suggests that statistical studies of other inhabited planets' atmospheres could reveal how they co-evolve with life. While many evolutionary pathways…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
Motivated by the possibility that different versions of the laws of physics could be realized within other universes, this paper delineates the galactic parameters that allow for habitable planets and revisits constraints on the amplitude…
We modeled the evolution of the Milky Way to trace the distribution in space and time of four prerequisites for complex life: the presence of a host star, enough heavy elements to form terrestrial planets, sufficient time for biological…