Related papers: Was Venus Ever Habitable? Constraints from a Coupl…
Ground based observers have on 5/6th June 2012 the last opportunity of the century to watch the passage of Venus across the solar disk from Earth. Venus transits have traditionally provided unique insight into the Venus atmosphere through…
Exoplanets orbiting M-dwarfs within habitable zones are exposed to stellar environments more extreme than that terrestrial planets experience in our Solar System, which can significantly impact the atmospheres of the exoplanets and affect…
Inferring the climate and surface conditions of terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone is a major goal for the field of exoplanet science. This pursuit will require both statistical analyses of the population of habitable planets as…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) can result from dynamical scattering processes happening in the first few million years of a planetary system's life. Several models predict the possibility, for these isolated planetary-mass objects, to retain…
A combined fluid/kinetic model is developed to calculate thermally driven escape of N2 from Pluto's atmosphere for two solar heating conditions: no heating above 1450 km and solar minimum heating conditions. In the combined model,…
Many planets in the solar system and across the galaxy have hydrogen-rich atmospheres overlying more heavy element-rich interiors with which they interact for billions of years. Atmosphere-interior interactions are thus crucial to…
Venus, our neighboring planet, is an open-air laboratory that can be used to study why Earth and Venus evolved in such different ways. Noble gases in planetary atmospheres are tracers of their geophysical evolution, and measuring the…
A major open question in exoplanet research is whether secondary atmospheres are rare around Earth-sized rocky exoplanets. In this work we determine the distance at which an Earth-sized planet orbiting a variety of stellar hosts could…
Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
Millimeter-waveband spectra of Venus from both the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) seem to indicate there may be evidence (signal-to-noise ratio of about $15\sigma$) of a…
Seven temperate Earth-sized exoplanets readily amenable for atmospheric studies transit the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 (refs 1,2). Their atmospheric regime is unknown and could range from extended primordial hydrogen-dominated…
The presence of an atmosphere over sufficiently long timescales is widely perceived as one of the most prominent criteria associated with planetary surface habitability. We address the crucial question as to whether the seven Earth-sized…
Because the solar luminosity increases over geological timescales, Earth climate is expected to warm, increasing water evaporation which, in turn, enhances the atmospheric greenhouse effect. Above a certain critical insolation, this…
The potential detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus has reignited interest in the possibility of life aloft in this environment. If the cloud decks of Venus are indeed an abode of life, it should reside in the "habitable zone"…
The internal heat flows of both Uranus and Neptune remain major outstanding problems in planetary science. Uranus' surprisingly cold effective temperature is inconsistent with adiabatic thermal evolution models, while Neptune's substantial…
The evolution of exoplanetary atmospheres is strongly influenced by atmospheric escape, particularly for close-in planets. Fractionation during atmospheric loss can preferentially remove lighter elements such as hydrogen, while retaining…
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?…
Phase separation between hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures leads to the rainout of helium in the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn. This process, also known as "helium rain", affects their long-term evolution.…
Exoplanet surveys around M dwarfs have detected a growing number of exoplanets with Earth-like insolation. It is expected that some of those planets are rocky planets with the potential for temperate climates favourable to surface liquid…
To explain Venus' young surface age and lack of plate tectonics, Venus' tectonic regime has often been proposed to be either an episodic-lid regime with global lithospheric overturns, or an equilibrium resurfacing regime with numerous…