Habitable Zone: Definitions, Estimations, and Recent Advances

About 5000 exoplanets have been confirmed, and the number is still increasing rapidly. Discovering planets itself is insufficient, however, unless we also know which of them are potentially habitable: Do any of these planets have conditions that would support life? What factors favor the building and maintenance of a temperate environment for life? In this talk, I will present how to define habitable zone around stars and how to estimate the habitable zone based on 1D and 3D climate models. I will review recent advances, such as limited CO2 cycles, habitable H2 worlds, and the effects of clouds and sea-ice motion. Identifing which planets are potentially habitable or unhabitable is critical for follow-up atmospheric characterizations and biosignature detections.

Speaker: 
Jun Yang (PKU)
Place: 
KIAA-auditorium
Host: 
Xian Chen
Time: 
Thursday, December 9, 2021 - 3:30PM to Thursday, December 9, 2021 - 4:30PM
Biography: 
Jun Yang did phD study at the Peking University between 2007 and 2013. After that, he did postdoc research on planetary climate and habitability at the University of Chicago between 2013 and 2016. In 2016, he joined the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences of the Peking Univerisy as an Assistant Professor. In his research he uses idealized physical models, 3D complex numerical models, and fluid dynamical theories to understand and explain fundamental problems in Earth and Planetary Sciences, such as the flow characteristics of atmosphere, ocean and ice and the climate and habitability of planets in and beyond the solar system. Recently he's been focusing on tidally locked terrestrial planets orbiting around low-mass stars, such as how clouds and oceans influence their habitability.