Related papers: Habitability Models for Astrobiology
The potential habitability of known exoplanets is often categorized by a nominal equilibrium temperature assuming a Bond albedo of either 0.3, similar to Earth, or 0. As an indicator of habitability, this leaves much to be desired, because…
Determining the habitability of terrestrial exoplanets is a complex problem that represents the next major step for the astrophysical community. The majority of current models treat these planets as homogeneous or contain heterogeneity that…
The search for life has two goals essentially: looking for planets with Earth-like conditions (Earth similarity) and looking for the possibility of life in some form (habitability). Determining habitability from exoplanet data requires that…
Stellar elemental abundances direct impact planetary interior structure and mineralogy, surface composition, and life. However, the different communities that are necessary for planetary habitability exploration (astrophysics, planetary…
Stellar activity and planetary atmospheric properties have the potential to strongly influence habitability. To date, neither have been adequately studied in the multiverse context, so there has been no assessment of how these effects…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for…
With a fleet of exploratory space missions on the horizon, the study of target specific biospheres is crucial for accurately determining the probability of the existence of microbial life on various planetary bodies and prioritising targets…
Provided that sufficient resources are deployed, we can look forward to an extraordinary future in which we will characterize potentially habitable planets. Until now, we have had to base interpretations of observations on habitability…
The search for habitable exoplanets inspires the question - how do habitable planets form? Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The…
The habitable zone is defined as the orbital region around a star where planetary feedback cycles buffer atmospheric greenhouse gases that, in combination with solar luminosity, maintain surface temperatures suitable for liquid water.…
The habitable zone (HZ) is the region around a star(s) where standing bodies of water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. The classical HZ definition makes a number of assumptions common to the Earth, including assuming that the…
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…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
The study of planetary habitability beyond Earth remains a central and challenging project in planetary science. Analysis of large volumes of planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, and JWST is directed ultimately at…
Before about 500 million years ago, most probably our planet experienced temporary snowball conditions, with continental and sea ices covering a large fraction of its surface. This points to a potential bistability of Earth's climate, that…
With recent advances in exoplanet observational techniques enabling the discovery of increasingly smaller planets, a crucial question emerges in the search for habitable planets: how small can a planet be and still maintain an atmosphere?…
The detection and characterization of Earth-like planet is approaching rapidly thanks to radial velocity surveys (HARPS), transit searches (Corot, Kepler) and space observatories dedicated to their characterization are already in…
The search for life on the planets outside the Solar System can be broadly classified into the following: looking for Earth-like conditions or the planets similar to the Earth (Earth similarity), and looking for the possibility of life in a…
In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…