Related papers: Dead Zones of Classical Habitability in Stellar Bi…
The habitable zone (HZ) is the circumstellar region where a planet can sustain surface liquid water. Searching for terrestrial planets in the HZ of nearby stars is the stated goal of ongoing and planned extrasolar planet surveys. Previous…
We demonstrate that habitable Earth-mass planets and moons can exist in the Kepler-16 system, known to host a Saturn-mass planet around a stellar binary, by investigating their orbital stability in the standard and extended habitable zone…
Massive stars dominate the radiative and mechanical feedback of young stellar populations, yet their intense ultraviolet fields and strong winds are typically presumed to preclude Earth-like habitability. We quantify this expectation by…
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…
The aim of this paper is to underline conditions necessary for the emergence and development of life. They are placed at local planetary scale, at Galactic scale and within the cosmological evolution, as pointed out by the Anthropic…
Habitability varies dramatically with location and time in the universe. This was recognized centuries ago, but it was only in the last few decades that astronomers began to systematize the study of habitability. The introduction of the…
To be habitable, a world (planet or moon) does not need to be located in the stellar habitable zone (HZ), and worlds in the HZ are not necessarily habitable. Here, we illustrate how tidal heating can render terrestrial or icy worlds…
It is currently unknown how common life is on exoplanets, or how long planets can remain viable for life. To date, we have a superficial notion of habitability, a necessary first step, but so far lacking an understanding of the detailed…
In this paper we discuss and illustrate the hypothesis that life substantially alters the state of a planetary environment and therefore, modifies the limits of the HZ as estimated for an uninhabited planet. This hypothesis lead to the…
Locating planets in HabitableZones (HZs) around other stars is a growing field in contemporary astronomy. Since a large percentage of all G-M stars in the solar neighbourhood are expected to be part of binary or multiple stellar systems,…
An analysis of the currently known exoplanets in the habitable zones (HZs) of their host stars is of interest in both the wake of the NASA Kepler mission and with prospects for expanding the known planet population through future ground-…
We demonstrate that the extension of the Habitable Zone (HZ) due to the presence of liquid water on the night side of tidally locked planets, modelled in this and earlier works, significantly increases the number of potentially habitable…
In this paper, we investigate whether hypothetical Earth-like planets have high probability of remaining on stable orbits inside the habitable zones around the stars A and B of {\alpha} Centauri, for lengths of time compatible with the…
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…
The habitability of a planet is influenced by both its parent star and the properties of its local stellar neighborhood. Potential threats to habitability from the local stellar environment mainly arise from two factors: cataclysmic events…
This paper outlines a simple approach to evaluate habitability of terrestrial planets by assuming different types of planetary atmospheres and using corresponding model calculations. Our approach can be applied for current and future…
The dominant paradigm in assigning "habitability"' to terrestrial planets is to define a circumstellar habitable zone: the locus of orbital radii in which the planet is neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it. One dimensional…
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…
Identifying terrestrial planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of other stars is one of the primary goals of ongoing radial velocity and transit exoplanet surveys and proposed future space missions. Most current estimates of the boundaries of…
The concept of Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ) was introduced a few years ago as an extension of the much older concept of Circumstellar Habitable Zone. However, the physical processes underlying the former concept are hard to identify and…