Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving Inferences About Exoplanet Habitability, Risinie D. Perera, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Assessing the habitability of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) is of great importance in deciding which planets warrant further careful study. Planets in the habitable zones of stars like our Sun are sufficiently far away from the star so that the light rays from the star can be assumed to be parallel, leading to straightforward analytic models for stellar illumination of the planet’s surface. However, for planets in the close-in habitable zones of dim red dwarf stars, such as the potentially habitable planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, the analytic illumination models based on the parallel ray approximation …