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Exoplanets

Predicting ‘Earth-like’ planets around red dwarfs

Nature Astronomy volume 6, pages 1231–1232 (2022)Cite this article

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The Earth is a rocky planet in the so-called classical habitable zone (HZ), with a surface ocean taking up just ~10–4 of its total mass. A study suggests that 5–10% of Earth-sized planets in the HZ around red dwarfs are ‘Earth-like’: rocky, with a small but non-zero amount of water on their surface.

Planet formation is a complicated multi-layered process that starts from submicron dust grains in the protoplanetary disk that is temporarily (105–107 year lifetime) formed as a by-product of stellar formation. In order to compare planet formation theory with observational data of exoplanets, the authors use a synthesized theoretical model4,5,6, consisting of many parts with a variety of physical processes. Similarly to climate modelling, in such simulations each part must be simplified from first-principles assumptions without loss of essential physics and its unknowns are treated as parameters. This approach is called planet population synthesis and can also study how each effect impacts the exoplanet distribution, as Kimura and Ikoma demonstrate in this paper. Previous simulations4,5,6 have focused on prediction of the distribution of mechanics parameters of planets: mass, physical radius, semimajor axis, and orbital eccentricities, because they were primary observational data.

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Fig. 1: Secondary production of water on planetary surfaces through chemical interaction between primordial atmospheres and magma oceans.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Shigeru Ida

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  1. Shigeru Ida
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Correspondence to Shigeru Ida.

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Ida, S. Predicting ‘Earth-like’ planets around red dwarfs. Nat Astron 6, 1231–1232 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01822-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01822-9

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