Related papers: Limit cycles can reduce the width of the habitable…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
The diversity of planetary systems that have been discovered are revealing the plethora of possible architectures, providing insights into planet formation and evolution. They also increase our understanding of system parameters that may…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
The climate of a planet can be strongly affected by its eccentricity due to variations in the stellar flux. There are two limits for the dependence of the inner habitable zone boundary (IHZ) on eccentricity: (1) the mean-stellar flux…
Low-gravity waterworlds ($M\lesssim 0.1 M_{\oplus}$) are of interest for their potential habitability. The weakly bound atmospheres of such worlds have proportionally larger radiative surfaces and are more susceptible to escape. We conduct…
Understanding the climate dynamics at the inner edge of the habitable zone (HZ) is crucial for predicting the habitability of rocky exoplanets. Previous studies using Global Climate Models (GCMs) have indicated that planets receiving high…
The Kepler data show that habitable small planets orbiting Red Dwarf stars (RDs) are abundant, and hence might be promising targets to look at for biomarkers and life. Planets orbiting within the Habitable Zone of RDs are close enough to be…
Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…
So far, multiple stellar systems harbor more than 130 extra solar planets. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of planetary formation process can lead to various planetary architecture (i.e. location, size, mass and water content)…
There are four different stable climate states for pure water atmospheres, as might exist on so-called "waterworlds". I map these as a function of solar constant for planets ranging in size from Mars size to 10 Earth-mass. The states are:…
During the last decade, there was a paradigm-shift in order to consider terrestrial planets within liquid-water habitable zones (LW-HZ) around M stars, as suitable places for the emergence and evolution of life. Here we analyze the…
Understanding the limits of rocky planet habitability is one of the key goals of current and future exoplanet characterization efforts. An intrinsic concept of rocky planet habitability is the Habitable Zone. To date, the most widely used…
In the search for life beyond our Solar system, attention should be focused on those planets that have the potential to maintain habitable conditions over the prolonged periods of time needed for the emergence and expansion of life as we…
The Alpha Centauri AB system is an attractive one for radial velocity observations to detect potential exoplanets. The high metallicity of both Alpha Centauri A and B suggest that they could have possessed circumstellar discs capable of…
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…
Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of low-mass stars undergo strong tidal effects that modify their spin states. These planets are expected to host dense atmospheres that can also play an important role in the spin evolution. On one…
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,…
We investigate how rapid stellar rotation commonly seen in A/F stars can influence planet habitability. Specifically, we model how rapid rotation influences a planet's irradiation and determine the location of the habitable zone for stars…
In recent years, several potentially habitable, probably terrestrial exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been discovered. The amount of CO2 in their atmosphere is of great importance for surface conditions and habitability. In the…
The dozens of rocky exoplanets discovered in the Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ) currently represent the most suitable places to host life as we know it outside the Solar System. However, the presumed presence of liquid water on the CHZ…