Related papers: How alien can alien worlds be?
Recent detections of potentially habitable exoplanets around sunlike stars demand increased exploration of the physical conditions that can sustain life, by whatever methods available. Insight into these conditions can be gained by…
The aim of this paper is to determinate the fundamental parameters of six exoplanet host (EH) stars and their planets. While techniques for detecting exoplanets yield properties of the planet only as a function of the properties of the host…
We combine a semi-analytic model of galaxy evolution with constraints on circumstellar habitable zones and the distribution of terrestrial planets to probe the suitability of galaxies of different mass and type to host habitable planets,…
With the aim of connecting the compositions of stars and planets, we present the abundances of carbon and oxygen, as well as iron and nickel, for the transiting exoplanet host star XO-2N and its wide-separation binary companion XO-2S.…
Given the considerable percentage of stars that are members of binaries or stellar multiples in the Solar neighborhood, it is expected that many of these binaries host planets, possibly even habitable ones. The discovery of a terrestrial…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
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…
We present a survey of >4,000 star compositions from the Hypatia Catalog to examine whether rocky exoplanets (i.e., those with rocky surfaces, dominated by silicates) might be geologically similar to Earth, at least with respect to…
We derive the abundance of 19 elements in a sample of 64 stars with fundamental parameters very similar to solar, which minimizes the impact of systematic errors in our spectroscopic 1D-LTE differential analysis, using high-resolution…
We present carbon and oxygen abundances for 941 FGK stars-the largest such catalog to date. We find that planet-bearing systems are enriched in these elements. We self-consistently measure C/O, which is thought to play a key role in planet…
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…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
In exoplanet research, the focus is increasingly on identifying Earth analogs, planets similar in density and habitability potential. As the number of rocky exoplanets grows, parallel discussions have emerged on system architectures and…
The potential habitability of a terrestrial planet is usually defined by the possible existence of liquid water on its surface. The potential presence of liquid water depends on many factors such as, most importantly, surface temperatures.…
A planet's climate can be strongly affected by its orbital eccentricity and obliquity. Here we use a 1-dimensional energy balance model modified to include a simple runaway greenhouse (RGH) parameterization to explore the effects of these…
The composition of the protoplanetary disc is linked to the composition of the host star, where a higher overall metallicity of the host star provides more building blocks for planets. However, most planet formation simulations only link…
Much of a planet's composition could be determined right at the onset of formation. Laboratory experiments can constrain these early steps. This includes static tensile strength measurements or collisions carried out under Earth's gravity…
Roughly half of Solar-type planet hosts have stellar companions, so understanding how these binary companions affect the formation and evolution of planets is an important component to understanding planetary systems overall. Measuring the…
If the origin of life and the evolution of observers on a planet is favoured by atypical properties of a planet's host star, we would expect our Sun to be atypical with respect to such properties. The Sun has been described by previous…
A stellar evolution computer model has been used to determine changes in the luminosity L and effective temperature T(e) of single stars during their time on the main sequence. The range of stellar masses investigated was from 0.5 to 1.5…