Continuous Habitable Zones: Pairing a GCM and Bayesian Framework to
Predict Habitable Zone Evolution
- Austin Ware,
- Nancy Kiang,
- Patrick Young
Abstract
In the near-future, new space telescopes like JWST, LUVOIR, and HabEx
will begin attempting to explore the properties of atmospheres of
potentially habitable planets. This will require a significant amount of
time and resources for even a single planet, which makes it essential to
prioritize observations by those most-likely to have detectable life.
Here we present a statistical method to estimate the probabilities that
specific exoplanets have been continuously in the habitable zone of
their host stars for more than 2 billion years, the approximate time it
took life on Earth to significantly increase the oxygen content of the
atmosphere. We introduce the use of statistics of an ensemble of 3D
planetary general circulation models to estimate these probabilities,
replacing prior 1D model estimates.