Tag Info

9

Nobody knows the limits of the Sun's habitable zone, or how broad or narrow it is. Here is a link to a list of various estimates of the inner, or outer, or both, edges of the circumstellar habitable zone of the Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone#Solar_System_estimates Note that one well known estimate, that of Hart et al. in 1979,...

5

Habitable zones, defined in terms of equilibrium temperature, scale with the square root of the luminosity of the star. So whatever the habitable zone limits $[a_{inner},a_{outer}]$ are for the Sun, for another star a good starting guess is $\sqrt{L/L_\odot}$ times those limits*. For Betelgeuse the simple-minded square root model gives a time-varying ...

3

Supernovas have a light curve going from normal to peak and back on the order of a month. Hence the spot would go from too cold to habitable and back very quickly. The same is true for stars passing the focal point: their motion (typically tens of km per second) makes the heated point move equally fast. Habitable zone denotes a region where a planet could ...

3

Back of the envelope time. First, we have to assume perfect data, so the only factor at play here is whether there is a geometric eclipse or not. Of course if you have poorer data then you will miss some planets because they are too small. i.e. We are looking for the fraction that can be detected in principle. Let's assume the planets are small enough that ...

3

That is a fascinating question due to the fact that planetary orbits have both absolute and relative spacing. The absolute spacing between planetary orbits is the number of kilometers that the semi major axis of the orbit of the outer planet exceeds the semi major axis of the orbit of the inner planet by. The relative spacing is the ratio between the semi-...

2

Short Answer: With current knowledge nobody knows. Some calculations suggest that it might be possible for a tidally locked planet to be habitable and to have life. Long Answer: The first stop searching for information about the habitability of tidally locked planets in red dwarf star systems might be the Wikipedia article Planetary Habitability. ...

2

I note that in old style space opera type stories, such as Star Trek, it is common to mention and visit habitable planets orbiting around types of stars which should not have habitable planets for various reasons. Thus one could assumed that in such stories hypothetical super advanced aliens have moved habitable planets into orbit around those stars, or ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible