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Proxima B Habitability Study Adds Climate Model

posted by on Thursday May 18 2017, @03:34AM   
from the just-like-earth dept.

takyon writes:

[N]ew models increasingly suggest that the closest Earth-like planet to our solar system could be habitable. Researchers first started playing a bit of "fantasy exoplanet" with the rocky world—dubbed Proxima b—last year after scientists discovered it orbiting our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri. With knowledge only of the luminosity of the star (1/600 that of the sun), the mass of the planet (1.3 times that of Earth), and the length of its orbit (11.2 days), the team was able to predict that, with a variety of possible atmospheres, it would be possible for Proxima b to harbor liquid water on its surface.

Now, another team has upped the level of detail by taking a climate model designed for Earth—the Unified Model developed by the United Kingdom's Met Office—and pasted it onto Proxima b.

[...] As the team reports today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, it found an even wider range of circumstances in which Proxima b could have liquid water than the earlier study. The fact that the two very different models agree so closely is "somewhat remarkable," the team writes.

Source: Daniel Clery at sciencemag.org

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Original Submission

• Re:Looks wrong (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @10:55AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @10:55AM (#511629)

  This is all same AC still. Now that I looked at the earlier paper[1] I see that one must be wrong too. If you check Fig 7 you see their model allows a troposphere above 0.1 bar. This is not seen for any planets/moons in the solar system, so is likely non-physical:[2]

  A minimum atmospheric temperature, or tropopause, occurs at a pressure of around 0.1 bar in the atmospheres of Earth, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, despite great differences in atmospheric composition, gravity, internal heat and sunlight. In all these bodies, the tropopause separates a stratosphere with a temperature profile that is controlled by the absorption of shortwave solar radiation, from a region below characterised by convection, weather, and clouds.

  [1] https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2016/12/aa29577-16/aa29577-16.html [aanda.org]
  [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6859 [arxiv.org]

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+3
  Interesting=3, Total=3
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  Total Score:		3