Habitable Zones & Global Climate

Prospects For The Characterization Of Habitable Planets

By Keith Cowing

astro-ph.EP

April 24, 2023

Filed under astro-ph.EP

Prospects For The Characterization Of Habitable Planets — Distribution of the currently detected planets with the conservative and optimistic habitable zones as a function of stellar temperature of the host star and the flux received by the planet. The flux received is normalized to the Earth one. This plot is regularly updated and produced by the planetary habitability laboratory at the university of Puerto Rico www.phl.upr.edu — astro-ph.EP

With thousands of exoplanets now identified, the characterization of habitable planets and the potential identification of inhabited ones is a major challenge for the coming decades.

We review the current working definition of habitable planets, the upcoming observational prospects for their characterization and present an innovative approach to assess habitability and inhabitation. This integrated method couples for the first time the atmosphere and the interior modeling with the biological activity based on ecosystem modeling.

We review here the first applications of the method to asses the likelihood and impact of methanogenesis for Enceladus, primitive Earth, and primitive Mars. Informed by these applications for solar system situations where habitability and inhabitation is questionned, we show how the method can be used to inform the design of future space observatories by considering habitability and inhabitation of Earth-like exoplanets around sun-like stars.

S. Mazevet, A. Affholder, B. Sauterey, A. Bixel, D. Apai, R Ferriere

Comments: 16 pages, 4 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2304.11570 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2304.11570v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Journal reference: Comptes rendus de physique, academie des sciences 2023
Submission history
From: Stephane Mazevet
[v1] Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:02:39 UTC (3,147 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11570
Astrobiology,

Keith Cowing

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) 🖖🏻

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