Habitable Zones & Global Climate: February 2021

Since the formation of the terrestrial planets, atmospheric loss has irreversibly altered their atmospheres, leading to remarkably different surface environments - Earth has remained habitable while Venus and Mars are apparently desolate.

Tidally locked exoplanets likely host global atmospheric circulations with a superrotating equatorial jet, planetary-scale stationary waves and thermally-driven overturning circulation.

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present.

New research led by Carnegie's Yingwei Fei provides a framework for understanding the interiors of super-Earths--rocky exoplanets between 1.5 and 2 times the size of our home planet--which is a prerequisite to assess their potential for habitability.

We investigate atmospheric responses of modeled hypothetical Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of the M-dwarf AD Leonis to reduced oxygen (O2), removed biomass (dead Earth), varying carbon dioxide (CO2) and surface relative humidity (sRH).