Habitable Zones & Global Climate: March 2020

The available models of global climate evolution in habitable earthlike planets do not consider the effect of salt content in oceans, which affects water evaporation.

Based on numbers of stars, supernova rates, and metallicity, a prior study (Dayal et al. 2015) concluded that large elliptical galaxies contain up to 10,000 times more habitable planets than the Milky Way and are thus the "cradles of life".


Since the launch of Kepler and Hubble more than a decade ago, we have come a long way in the quest to find a potentially habitable exoplanet. To date, we have already discovered more than 4000 exoplanets most of which are not suitable for sustaining life.

In this work is investigated the possibility of close-binary star systems having Earth-size planets within their habitable zones.


Shungite, a unique carbon-rich sedimentary rock from Russia that deposited 2 billion years ago, holds clues about oxygen concentrations on Earth's surface at that time.

Most planets currently amenable to transit spectroscopy are close enough to their host star to exhibit a relatively strong day to night temperature gradient. For hot planets, this leads to cause a chemical composition dichotomy between the two hemispheres.

A key factor in determining the potential habitability of synchronously rotating planets is the strength of the atmospheric boundary layer inversion between the dark side surface and the free atmosphere.

Researchers supported in part by the NASA Astrobiology Program have attempted to better understand global barometric pressure on Earth during the Archaean by studying vesicle sizes in 2.9 billion year-old lavas that erupted near sea level.

Little is known about the interaction between atmospheres and crusts of exoplanets so far, but future space missions and ground-based instruments are expected to detect molecular features in the spectra of hot rocky exoplanets.

The habitability of the surface of any planet is determined by a complex evolution of its interior, surface, and atmosphere. The electromagnetic and particle radiation of stars drive thermal, chemical and physical alteration of planetary atmospheres, including escape.

Recent analysis of the planet K2-18b has shown the presence of water vapour in its atmosphere. While the H2O detection is significant, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3 spectrum suggests three possible solutions of very different nature which can equally match the data.

Chemical changes in the oceans more than 800 million years ago almost destroyed the oxygen-rich atmosphere that paved the way for complex life on Earth, new research suggests.

New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet's first lifeforms, may have been a real-life "waterworld"-- without a continent in sight. The study, which appears March 2 in Nature Geoscience, takes advantage of a quirk of hydrothermal chemistry to suggest that the surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.2 billion years ago.