Habitable Zones & Global Climate

Photosynthesis on Habitable Planets Around low-mass Stars

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
January 7, 2019
Filed under
Photosynthesis on Habitable Planets Around low-mass Stars
Habitable Planet Orbiting A Red Dwarf
SpaceRef

We show that planets around M-dwarfs with M⋆≲0.2M⊙ may not receive enough photons in the photosynthetically active range of 400-750 nm to sustain Earth-like biospheres.

As a result of the lower biological productivity, it is likely that biotic molecular oxygen will not build up to detectable levels in the atmospheres of habitable planets orbiting low-mass stars.

Manasvi Lingam, Abraham Loeb
(Submitted on 4 Jan 2019)

Comments: 4 pages; 2 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:1901.01270 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1901.01270v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Manasvi Lingam
[v1] Fri, 4 Jan 2019 19:00:23 UTC (122 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01270
Astrobiology

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻