The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars

By Aomawa L. Shields, S. Ballard, J. Johnson. 2016

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The prospects for the habitability of M-dwarf planets have long been debated, due to key differences between the unique stellar and planetary environments around these low-mass stars, as compared to hotter, more luminous Sun-like stars. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made by both space- and ground-based observatories to measure the likelihood of small planets to orbit in the habitable zones of M-dwarf stars. We now know that most M dwarfs are hosts to closely-packed planetary systems characterized by a paucity of Jupiter-mass planets and the presence of multiple rocky planets, with roughly a third of these rocky M-dwarf planets orbiting within the habitable zone, where they have the potential to support liquid water on their surfaces. Theoretical studies have also quantified the effect on climate and habitability of the interaction between the spectral energy distribution of M-dwarf stars and the atmospheres and surfaces of their planets. These and other recent results fill in knowledge gaps that existed at the time of the previous overview papers published nearly a decade ago by Tarter et al. (2007) and Scalo et al. (2007). In this review we provide a comprehensive picture of the current knowledge of M-dwarf planet occurrence and habitability based on work done in this area over the past decade, and summarize future directions planned in this quickly evolving field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78f64a683a0ce8f1c2a9432c33791e5fbadc6d6c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Jon Fortney
2. E. Gaidos
3. Sara Seager
4. A. Mann
5. D. Charbonneau
6. N. Madhusudhan
7. L. Kaltenegger
8. A. Kraus

In Education

1. J. Lustig-Yaeger
2. R. Luger
3. G. Feiden
4. J. Winn
5. A. Mann
6. Sara Seager
7. E. Newton
8. Jon Fortney

In Instrumentation

1. Jon Fortney
2. Sara Seager
3. J. Winn
4. E. Gaidos
5. A. Mann
6. A. Kraus
7. J. Lustig-Yaeger
8. Laura Kreidberg

Citations in the corpus

• How to Constrain Your M Dwarf. II. The Mass–Luminosity–Metallicity Relation from 0.075 to 0.70 Solar Masses (2018, background): “The small size, low mass, and low luminosity of late-type stars facilitate the discovery of small planets (e.g. Muirhead et al. 2012b; Martinez et al. 2017; Mann et al. 2018) in their circumstellar habitable zone (e.g., Tarter et al. 2007; Shields et al. 2016; Dittmann et al. 2017).”
• Stellar Flares from the First TESS Data Release: Exploring a New Sample of M Dwarfs (2019, background): “…the stellar type; stellar companions; the exoplanet’s atmospheric composition or absence of an atmosphere; the exoplanet’s surface; potential sub-surface habitability; and many other factors (see e.g. Seager et al. 2013; Barnes et al. 2015; Shields et al. 2016; Meadows & Barnes 2018).”
• Observing the Atmospheres of Known Temperate Earth-sized Planets with JWST (2017, background): “…to be illustrative of a broad range of atmospheres, not definitive estimates of liquid-water habitable zones, which have previously been published in many other relevant works (see, e.g., Kasting et al. 1993; Selsis et al. 2007; Wordsworth et al. 2011; Kopparapu et al. 2013; Shields et al. 2016).”
• The Surface UV Environment on Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry and the Need for Experimental Follow-up (2017, background): “Extensive work has been done on M-dwarf planet habitability, i.e., whether life as we know it could endure on these worlds; see, e.g., Tarter et al. (2007), Scalo et al. (2007), and Shields et al. (2016) for reviews of work on this topic.”
• How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life (2017, background): “Several potential drawbacks for planets in the HZs of M stars have been discussed, creating a lively field of research (e.g., reviewed in Scalo et al. 2007, Shields et al. 2016).”
• Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Review of Remotely Detectable Signs of Life (2017, background): “e worlds (Ranjan et al., 2017). Despite these concerns, a provisional consensus holds that M dwarf stars may indeed possess potentially habitable planets (Tarter et al., 2007; Scalo et al., 2007; see Shields et al., 2016a, for a recent, thorough review of the habitability of planets around M stars).”
• Is Proxima Centauri b Habitable? A Study of Atmospheric Loss (2017, background): “Hence, there have been numerous HZ studies of Mdwarf exoplanets (Tarter et al. 2007; Scalo et al. 2007; Shields et al. 2016).”
• Evolved Climates and Observational Discriminants for the TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System (2018, background): “Determining whether these abundant Mdwarf HZ planets are in fact habitable is therefore a keyfocus in astrobiology and exoplanet science (see, e.g., Shields et al. 2016; Meadows et al. 2018a, for reviews).”