Related papers: Tides Tighten the Hycean Habitable Zone
Many extrasolar (bound) terrestrial planets and free-floating (unbound) planets have been discovered. The existence of bound and unbound terrestrial planets with liquid water is an important question, and of particular importance is the…
We study the habitability of the two 1-2 Earth-mass planets, recently detected by the CARMENES collaboration, around the ultra-cool nearby M dwarf Teegarden's Star. With orbital periods of 4.9 and 11.4 days, both planets are likely to be…
During the post-main sequence phase of stellar evolution the orbital distance of the habitable zone, which allows for liquid surface water on terrestrial planets, moves out past the system's original frost line, providing an opportunity for…
Atmospheric tides can strongly affect the rotational dynamics of planets. In the family of Earth-like planets, such as Venus, this physical mechanism coupled with solid tides makes the angular velocity evolve over long timescales and…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
Arid terrestrial exoplanets are potentially abundant and are thus interesting targets in the search for life. In particular, M-dwarf planets such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system may possess limited surface water, whereas early solar…
In this paper we develop a theory of disturbances induced by the stellar tidal field in a fully convective slowly rotating planet orbiting on a highly eccentric orbit around a central star. We show that there are two contributions to the…
Large ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like planets in the near future. We explore how different planetary surfaces can strongly influence the climate, atmospheric composition, and remotely detectable spectra…
The classical habitable zone is the circular region around a star in which liquid water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. The outer edge of the traditional N2-CO2-H2O habitable zone (HZ) extends out to nearly 1.7 AU in our Solar…
M-stars comprise 80% of main-sequence stars, and so their planetary systems provide the best chance for finding habitable planets, i.e.: those with surface liquid water. We have modelled the broadband albedo or reflectivity of water ice and…
A stellar evolution computer model has been used to determine changes in the luminosity L and effective temperature T(e) of single stars during their time on the main sequence. The range of stellar masses investigated was from 0.5 to 1.5…
The relative abundances of exotic environments provides us with (uninformed) bounds on the habitability of those environments relative to our own, on the basis that our presence here is not too atypical. For instance, since red stars…
Photochemical hazes are important opacity sources in temperate exoplanet atmospheres, hindering current observations from characterizing exoplanet atmospheric compositions. The haziness of an atmosphere is determined by the balance between…
We investigate how rapid stellar rotation commonly seen in A/F stars can influence planet habitability. Specifically, we model how rapid rotation influences a planet's irradiation and determine the location of the habitable zone for stars…
Exomoons around free-floating planets (FFPs) can survive their host planet's ejection. Such ejections can increase their orbital eccentricity, providing significant tidal heating in the absence of any stellar energy source. Previous studies…
Low-gravity waterworlds ($M\lesssim 0.1 M_{\oplus}$) are of interest for their potential habitability. The weakly bound atmospheres of such worlds have proportionally larger radiative surfaces and are more susceptible to escape. We conduct…
Exoplanets with lower equilibrium temperatures than Earth and primordial hydrogen atmospheres that evaporate after formation should pass through transient periods where oceans can form on their surfaces, as liquid water can form below a few…
The galactic habitable zone is defined as the region with sufficient abundance of heavy elements to form planetary systems in which Earth-like planets could be born and might be capable of sustaining life, after surviving to close supernova…
With seven planets, the TRAPPIST-1 system has the largest number of exoplanets discovered in a single system so far. The system is of astrobiological interest, because three of its planets orbit in the habitable zone of the ultracool M…
After finding more planets than expected at the shortest period, there has been an effort to explain their numbers by weak tidal friction. However, we find that the strength of tidal dissipation that would produce the occurence distribution…