Habitable Zones & Global Climate: July 2017

A new Statistical-likelihood Exo-Planetary Habitability Index (SEPHI) is presented. It has been developed to cover the current and future features required for a classification scheme disentangling whether any discovered exoplanet is potentially habitable compared with life on Earth.

Discoveries of extrasolar planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of their parent star lead to questions about the habitability of massive moons orbiting planets in the HZ. Around low-mass stars, the HZ is much closer to the star than for Sun-like stars.

As evident from the nearby examples of Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1, Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of low-mass stars are common. Here, we focus on such planetary systems and argue that their (oceanic) tides could be more prominent due to stronger tidal forces.

Two separate teams of scientists have identified major challenges for the development of life in what has recently become one of the most famous exoplanet systems, TRAPPIST-1.

One of the most fundamental questions in exoplanetology is to determine whether a given planet is habitable.

Radio Exploration of Planetary Habitability was the fifth in the series of American Astronomical Society's Topical Conference Series.

Solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) produce adverse space weather effects at Earth.

New models of massive stellar eruptions hint at an extra layer of complexity when considering whether an exoplanet may be habitable or not.