Rocky Worlds survey Archives

The Cosmic Shoreline. Light-green dots are all known exoplanets with reported atmospheric detections from the ExoAtmospheres database, noting that some of these detections are tentative or remain contested in the literature (e.g., GJ 1132 b). Solar System objects are marked as black crosses or green triangles if they host an atmosphere. The red dashed line is the cosmic shoreline as defined by Zahnle & Catling (2017). The black dotted is the same classical line, preserving the slope, but taking as zero point the exoplanet 55 Cnc e. The black dashed-dotted line is our newly proposed Empirical Exoplanet Cosmic Shoreline (EECS), which makes use of both Mars and several exoplanet atmospheric detections to define the slope and zero-point value. The numbers highlighted in the inset show the names of the seven planets discussed in the definition of the EECS. -- astro-ph.EP

An Empirical Determination Of The Cosmic Shoreline

by Keith CowingJune 23, 2026June 23, 2026

The cosmic shoreline concept was introduced to separate planets with atmospheres from those without, by relating the cumulative X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) instellation (integrated over the planet’s lifetime) to the […]

Cosmic Shoreline for all known planetary systems orbiting M-dwarf-type stars. The black dashed-dotted line is our newly proposed Empirical Cosmic Shoreline (ECS), same as in Figure 1. The gray points mark the systems whose atmospheres have not been studied; the orange ones mark the planets with reported strong non-detections; and the green ones mark the planets with a (tentative) atmosphere detection. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Icy Worlds, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report, Stellar Cartography

An Empirical Determination Of The Cosmic Shoreline

by Keith CowingAugust 19, 2025August 19, 2025

The Cosmic Shoreline concept was introduced as a way to separate planets with and without atmosphere, based on the relationship between the cumulative instellation and the escape velocity observed in […]