Related papers: Inner Habitable Zone Boundary for Eccentric Exopla…
Hycean planets -- exoplanets with substantial water ice layers, deep surface oceans, and hydrogen-rich atmospheres -- are thought to be favorable environments for life. Due to a relative paucity of atmospheric greenhouse gases, hycean…
We found evidence for critical internal heat values during significant geophysical transitions in the inner solar system planetary bodies in association with volcanism. From a simple rocky planet thermal evolution model, we could infer…
We use the sample of known stars and brown dwarfs within 5 pc of the Sun, supplemented with AFGK stars within 10 pc, to determine which stellar spectral types provide the most habitable real estate --- defined to be locations where liquid…
Conventional definitions of habitability require abundant liquid surface water to exist continuously over geologic timescales. Water in each of its thermodynamic phases interacts with solar and thermal radiation and is the cause for strong…
Planetary climates are strongly affected by planetary orbital parameters such as obliquity, eccentricity, and precession. In exoplanetary systems, exo-terrestrial planets should have various obliquities. High-obliquity planets would have…
Of the over 800 exoplanets detected to date, over half are on non-circular orbits, with eccentricities as high as 0.93. Such orbits lead to time-variable stellar heating, which has implications for the planet's atmospheric dynamical regime.…
The potential habitability of a terrestrial planet is usually defined by the possible existence of liquid water on its surface. The potential presence of liquid water depends on many factors such as, most importantly, surface temperatures.…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
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…
Detecting massive satellites of extrasolar planets has now become feasible, which led naturally to questions about their habitability. In a previous study we presented constraints on the habitability of moons from stellar and planetary…
Earth's climate is influenced by over a dozen feedbacks, but only three dominate its long-term climate behavior. Models of the exoplanet habitable zone (HZ) assume that this is similar for other Earth-like planets. We used dynamical…
The Alpha Centauri AB system is an attractive one for radial velocity observations to detect potential exoplanets. The high metallicity of both Alpha Centauri A and B suggest that they could have possessed circumstellar discs capable of…
We introduce a novel Earth-like planet surface temperature model (ESTM) for habitability studies based on the spatial-temporal distribution of planetary surface temperatures. The ESTM adopts a surface Energy Balance Model complemented by:…
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…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…
Many parameters constraining the spectral appearance of exoplanets are still poorly understood. We therefore study the properties of irradiated exoplanet atmospheres over a wide parameter range including metallicity, C/O ratio and host…
Our knowledge of planets' orbital dynamics, which was based on Solar System studies, has been challenged by the diversity of exoplanetary systems. Around cool and ultra cool dwarfs, the influence of tides on the orbital and spin evolution…
With more and more extrasolar planets discovered in and around binary star systems, questions concerning the determination of the classical Habitable Zone arise. Do the radiative and gravitational perturbations of the second star influence…
Relatively little is understood about the atmospheric composition of temperate to warm exoplanets (equilibrium temperature $T_{\rm eq}<$ 1000 K), as many of them are found to have uncharacteristically flat transmission spectra. Their…