Related papers: Decrease in hysteresis of planetary climate for pl…
Recent studies have shown that ocean dynamics can have a significant warming effect on the permanent night sides of 1 to 1 tidally locked terrestrial exoplanets with Earth-like atmospheres and oceans in the middle of the habitable zone.…
Star-planet interactions play, among other things, a crucial role in planetary orbital configurations by circularizing orbits, aligning the star and planet spin and synchronizing stellar rotation with orbital motions. This is especially…
The chance that a planetary system will interact with another member of its host star's nascent cluster would be greatly increased if gas giant planets form in situ on wide orbits. In this paper, we explore the outcomes of planet-planet…
Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…
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 solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
Global climate evolution models for habitable earthlike planets do not consider the effect of ocean salinity on land ice formation through the hydrological cycle. We consider two categories of such planets: planets with deep oceans, but…
White dwarfs offer a unique opportunity to search nearby stellar systems for signs of life, but the habitable zone around these stars is still poorly understood. Since white dwarfs are compact stars with low luminosity, any planets in their…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
Synchronously orbiting, tidally-locked exoplanets with a dayside facing their star and a permanently dark nightside orbiting dim stars are prime candidates for habitability. Simulations of these planets often show the potential to maintain…
Variations in the reflective properties of the bulk material that comprises the surface of land-dominated planets will affect the planetary energy balance by interacting differently with incident radiation from the host star. Furthermore,…
At least 30\% of main sequence stars host planets with sizes of between 1 and 4 Earth radii and orbital periods of less than 100 days. We use N-body simulations including a model for gas-assisted pebble accretion and disk--planet tidal…
We present a large ensemble of simulations of an Earth-like world with increasing insolation and rotation rate. Unlike previous work utilizing idealized aquaplanet configurations we focus our simulations on modern Earth-like topography. The…
The habitable zone concept is important because it focuses the scientific search for extraterrestrial life and aids the planning of future telescopes. Recent work has shown that planets near the outer edge of the habitable zone might not…
For a wide range of values of the incoming solar radiation, the Earth features at least two attracting states, which correspond to competing climates. The warm climate is analogous to the present one; the snowball climate features global…
We calculate the evolution of planets undergoing a strong tidal encounter using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), for a range of periastron separations. We find that outside the Roche limit, the evolution of the planet is…
The recent discoveries of terrestrial exoplanets and super-Earths extending over a broad range of orbital and physical parameters suggest that these planets will span a wide range of climatic regimes. Characterization of the atmospheres of…
Bistability and hysteresis of magnetohydrodynamic dipolar dynamos generated by turbulent convection in rotating spherical fluid shells is demonstrated. Hysteresis appears as a transition between two distinct regimes of dipolar dynamos with…
The climates of terrestrial planets with a small amount of water on their surface, called land planets, are significantly different from the climates of planets having a large amount of surface water. Land planets have a higher runaway…
Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for…