HABITABLE ZONES AROUND MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: DEPENDENCE ON PLANETARY MASS

By R. Kopparapu, R. Ramirez, James Schottelkotte, J. Kasting, S. Domagal‐Goldman, Vincent Eymet. 2014

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ongoing discoveries of extra-solar planets are unveiling a wide range of terrestrial mass (size) planets around their host stars. In this Letter, we present estimates of habitable zones (HZs) around stars with stellar effective temperatures in the range 2600 K–7200 K, for planetary masses between 0.1 M⊕ and 5 M⊕. Assuming H2O-(inner HZ) and CO2-(outer HZ) dominated atmospheres, and scaling the background N2 atmospheric pressure with the radius of the planet, our results indicate that larger planets have wider HZs than do smaller ones. Specifically, with the assumption that smaller planets will have less dense atmospheres, the inner edge of the HZ (runaway greenhouse limit) moves outward (∼10% lower than Earth flux) for low mass planets due to larger greenhouse effect arising from the increased H2O column depth. For larger planets, the H2O column depth is smaller, and higher temperatures are needed before water vapor completely dominates the outgoing longwave radiation. Hence the inner edge moves inward (∼7% higher than Earth's flux). The outer HZ changes little due to the competing effects of the greenhouse effect and an increase in albedo. New, three-dimensional climate model results from other groups are also summarized, and we argue that further, independent studies are needed to verify their predictions. Combined with our previous work, the results presented here provide refined estimates of HZs around main-sequence stars and provide a step toward a more comprehensive analysis of HZs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc186ee014a70a06f873eaa0601004c422df991b

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Citations in the corpus

The habitability of Proxima Centauri b. I. Irradiation, rotation and volatile inventory from formation to the present (2016, background): “The observations of the Proxima system (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016) show that Proxima b is located in the classical insolation HZ (as defined in Kasting et al. 1993; Selsis et al. 2007b; Kopparapu 2013; Kopparapu et al. 2014).”
Modeling climate diversity, tidal dynamics and the fate of volatiles on TRAPPIST-1 planets (2017, result): “Article number, page 19 of 23 Our results are roughly in agreement with the reference papers by Kopparapu et al. (2013) and Kopparapu et al. (2014) on habitability.”
Habitable Moist Atmospheres on Terrestrial Planets near the Inner Edge of the Habitable Zone around M Dwarfs (2017, methodology): “Our own previous work on HZs (Kopparapu et al. 2013, 2014) using a 1D radiative-convective, cloud-free climate model, and updated with new and stronger H O2 absorption coefficients from HITRAN2008 and HITEMP2010 line-by-line (LBL) databases, showed that the inner edge of the HZ can be significantly…”
THE INNER EDGE OF THE HABITABLE ZONE FOR SYNCHRONOUSLY ROTATING PLANETS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS USING GENERAL CIRCULATION MODELS (2016, background): “D climate model studies of HZs (Kasting et al. 1993; Selsis et al. 2007b; Kopparapu et al. 2013, 2014) predicted that, for a water-rich planet such as Earth, two types of habitability limits exist near the inner edge: (1) A moist greenhouse limit, which occurs when the stratospheric water vapor…”
Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Review of Remotely Detectable Signs of Life (2017, background): “It is important to note that even this deﬁnition of the HZ depends on factors such as planetary gravity and atmospheric mass, which can alter the greenhouse effect due to pressure broadening effects (Kopparapu et al., 2014), and ice cover and surface composition (Shields et al., 2013, 2014). Other d”
The habitability of Proxima Centauri b II. Possible climates and Observability (2016, background): “= 0.123 M ), defined as the range of orbital distances within which a planet can possibly maintain liquid water on its surface (Kasting et al. 1993; Kopparapu et al. 2013; Leconte et al. 2013a; Yang et al. 2013; Kopparapu et al. 2014, 2016).”
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs (2018, background): “The planet candidate GJ 3779 b has a minimum mass Article number, page 4 of 15 of 8.0 ± 0.5 M⊕ orbiting at a semi-major axis of 0.026 au, much closer to the host star than the conservative habitable-zone limits (0.094–0.184 au, Kopparapu et al. 2013, 2014).”
Stellar Flares from the First TESS Data Release: Exploring a New Sample of M Dwarfs (2019, background): “…and migration history, tidal locking of the orbits, space weather, and other factors (see e.g. Huang 1959; Kasting et al. 1993; Pierrehumbert & Gaidos 2011; Kopparapu et al. 2013; Cullum et al. 2014; Kasting et al. 2014; Kopparapu et al. 2014; Ramirez & Kaltenegger 2014; Cullum & Stevens 2016).”
THE MUSCLES TREASURY SURVEY. I. MOTIVATION AND OVERVIEW (2016, methodology): “The plots show the average habitable zone distance for each star, 〈rHZ 〉, computed as the mean of “runaway greenhouse” and “maximum greenhouse” limits to the HZ presented by Kopparapu et al. (2014).”
A NEARBY M STAR WITH THREE TRANSITING SUPER-EARTHS DISCOVERED BY K2 (2015, background): “Planet d is located at the inner edge of the system’s habitable zone, with Sinc = 1.51 +0.57 −0.47S⊕ – close to the limits of the empirical habitable zone (e.g., Kopparapu et al. 2014)– making this planet a very interesting potential super-Venus or super-Earth.”
The CARMENES Search for Exoplanets around M Dwarfs: A Low-mass Planet in the Temperate Zone of the Nearby K2-18 (2018, background): “K2-18 b lies in the temperate zone of its host star (Kopparapu et al. 2013, 2014) and receives stellar irradiation similar to Earth.”