Royal Astronomical Society | 2019 Mar 07
Planetary systems can be harsh environments in their early history. The young worlds orbit suns in stellar nurseries, clusters of stars where violent encounters are commonplace. None of this makes it easy for life to get going, but now astronomers at the University of Sheffield find one positive of this tumultuous period. A model developed by undergraduate student Bethany Wootton and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow Dr Richard Parker looks at how the habitable zone – the region around a star where the temperature allows liquid water to exist – changes around pairs of stars, so-called binary systems.
The two scientists discovered that an encounter with a passing third star may squeeze the binary pair together, expanding the habitable zone in the process. Their results appear in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The habitable zone, sometimes called the ‘Goldilocks zone’ as the temperature is not too hot and not too cold, is thought to be essential for the development of life on a planet. If a planet lies outside this zone, then the formation of the complex molecules needed for life is less likely to happen.
Around one third of stellar systems in our galaxy are thought to be made up of two or more stars, and this fraction is much higher when stars are young. If these stars are a relatively large distance apart, the size of the Goldilocks zone around each star is governed by the radiation from the individual star. If the two stars are closer, the size of the Goldilocks zone increases because each star feels additional warmth from the other and this increases the likelihood of a planet being located in the right place for life to develop. ...
Enlarging Habitable Zones Around Binary Stars in Hostile Environments ~ Bethany A. Wootton, Richard J. Parker
- Monthly Notices of the RAS (online 07 Mar 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly238
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1903.01995 > 05 Mar 2019