Related papers: Habitability from Tidally-Induced Tectonics
We analyze the stability of a low-order coupled sea ice and climate model and extract the essential physics governing the time scales of response as a function of greenhouse gas forcing. Under present climate conditions the stability is…
In recent years, space missions such as Kepler and TESS have discovered many close-in planets with significant atmospheres consisting of hydrogen and helium: mini-Neptunes. This indicates that these planets formed early in gas-rich disks…
Habitable planets are commonly imagined to be temperate planets like Earth, with areas of open ocean and warm land. In contrast, planets in snowball states, where oceans are entirely ice-covered, are believed to be inhospitable. However, we…
What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic…
TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf hosting a system consisting of seven planets. While orbital properties, radii and masses of the planets are nowadays well constrained, one of the open fascinating issues is the possibility that an…
Clouds are ubiquitous\, -- \,they arise for every solar system planet that possesses an atmosphere and have also been suggested as a leading mechanism for obscuring spectral features in exoplanet observations. As exoplanet observations…
Thermal atmospheric tides have a strong impact on the rotation of terrestrial planets. They can lock these planets into an asynchronous rotation state of equilibrium. We aim at characterizing the dependence of the tidal torque resulting…
Rotational dynamics of the Earth, over geological timescales, have profoundly affected local and global climatic evolution, probably contributing to the evolution of life. To better retrieve the Earth's rotational history, and motivated by…
The presence of low viscosity layers in the mantle is supported by line of geological and geophysical observations. Recent high pressure and temperature investigations indicated that partial carbonate melt should exist at the bottom of the…
We study the interaction between stellar irradiation and tidal heating in gaseous planets with short orbital periods. The intentionally simplified atmospheric model we employ makes the problem analytically tractable and permits the…
Ongoing and future space missions aim to identify potentially habitable planets in our Solar System and beyond. Planetary habitability is determined not only by a planet's current stellar insolation and atmospheric properties, but also by…
The climates of terrestrial planets are largely determined by the composition of their atmospheres and spectral types of their host stars. Previous studies suggest a wide range of carbon species abundances (CO\textsubscript{2}, CO, and…
An intriguing problem in climate science is the existence of Earth's glacial cycles. We show that it is possible to generate these periodic changes in climate by means of the Earth's carbon cycle as the main determinant factor. The carbon…
55 Cancri e is a $\sim$8 Gyr rocky world (1.95 $R_\oplus$, 8.8 $M_\oplus$) orbiting a K-type star. JWST observations suggest a carbon-dominated atmosphere (CO$_2$/CO) over a global magma ocean ($>$3000 K). We suggest that any…
Planets in M dwarf stars' habitable zones are likely to be tidally locked with orbital periods of order tens of days. This means that the effects of rotation on atmospheric dynamics will be relatively weak, which requires small horizontal…
H$_2$-dominated terrestrial exoplanets are highly accessible to atmospheric characterization via transmission spectroscopy, but such atmospheres are generally thought to be unstable to escape. Here, we propose that close-in, eccentric…
We consider super-Earth sized planets which have a water mass fraction that is large enough to form an external mantle composed of high pressure water ice polymorphs and that lack a substantial H/He atmosphere. We consider such planets in…
The present Martian climate is characterized by a cold and dry environment with a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxides (CO2). In such conditions, the planetary climate and habitability are determined by the distribution of CO2 between…
Small exoplanets of nearby M dwarf stars present the possibility to find and characterize habitable worlds within the next decade. TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool M dwarf star, was recently found to have seven Earth-sized planets of predominantly…
The tectonic regime of rocky planets fundamentally influences their long-term evolution and cycling of volatiles between interior and atmosphere. Earth is the only known planet with active plate tectonics, but observations of exoplanets may…