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However, what makes a planet habitable is a much more complex question than having a planet located at the right distance from its host star so that water can be liquid on its surface: various geophysical and geodynamical aspects, the radiation, and the host star's plasma environment can influence the evolution of planets and life, if it ...
Planetary habitability in the Solar System is the study that searches the possible existence of past or present extraterrestrial life in those celestial bodies. As exoplanets are too far away and can only be studied by indirect means, the celestial bodies in the Solar System allow for a much more detailed study: direct telescope observation, space probes, rovers and even human spaceflight.
The following list includes some of the potentially habitable exoplanets discovered so far. It is mostly based on estimates of habitability by the Habitable Worlds Catalog (HWC), and data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The HWC is maintained by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. [1]
Beyond that, tidal heating might play a role for a moon's habitability. In 2012, scientists introduced a concept to define the habitable orbits of moons; [50] they define an inner border of an habitable moon around a certain planet and call it the circumplanetary "habitable edge". Moons closer to their planet than the habitable edge are ...
TOI-2257 b is an extremely eccentric (0.496) [2] exoplanet in or near the circumstellar habitable zone of the star TOI-2257, 188 light-years away. It is likely a sub-Neptune exoplanet, with a mass of 5.71 Mearth and a radius of 2.19 Rearth. [3]
Planet rotation axis tilt habitable zone, or obliquity habitable zone: the region where a stable axial tilt for a planet's rotation is maintained. [41] Earth's axis is tilted 23.5°; this gives seasons, providing snow and ice that can melt to provide water run off in the summer.
A hycean planet is a hypothetical type of planet with liquid water oceans under a hydrogen atmosphere. [1] The presence of extraterrestrial liquid water makes hycean planets regarded as promising candidates for planetary habitability. [2] [3] [4] They are usually considered to be larger and more massive than Earth. [5]
A planet's atmospheric conditions influence its ability to retain heat so that the location of the habitable zone is also specific to each type of planet: desert planets (also known as dry planets), with very little water, will have less water vapor in the atmosphere than Earth and so have a reduced greenhouse effect, meaning that a desert ...