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Imagine a tidally locked planet orbiting a red dwarf, where habitability is not situated close to terminator zone, but on a "small" cap normal to incident starlight (zenith) with permanent average +15 Celsius over the year, variations through year depending on orbit's eccentricity.

If there was in our solar system one (maybe not spherical) tidally locked body orbiting some close to circular orbit around the sun, how far from the sun would it be to meet those +15C average zenith cap temperature? Does it make habitable zone larger than it is?

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  • $\begingroup$ How do you propose to deal with heat transfer? $\endgroup$
    – ProfRob
    Dec 19, 2017 at 15:32
  • $\begingroup$ @RobJeffries I thought everything in equilibrium would result in +15C at cap. With maybe one anticyclonic eye above cap, air there exchanging heat at slow rate. $\endgroup$
    – jkztd
    Dec 19, 2017 at 16:31
  • $\begingroup$ I think you need to specify the temperature distribution and an albedo. In equilibrium the planet will re-radiate all energy incident upon it. $\endgroup$
    – ProfRob
    Dec 19, 2017 at 23:47
  • $\begingroup$ Thickness of the atmosphere is a factor. Venus has almost no temperature variation, day to night or equator to pole. The thinner the atmosphere, the greater the variation. There's no straight forward answer to this because there's a few factors that need to be accounted for. $\endgroup$
    – userLTK
    Dec 20, 2017 at 7:18
  • $\begingroup$ You might get some answers to this over at Worldbuilding. $\endgroup$
    – feetwet
    May 23, 2019 at 20:08

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