What Is The Habitable Zone?

We've found hundreds of exoplanets in the galaxy. But only a few of them have just the right combination of factors to hold life like Earth's.

The weather in your hometown is downright uninhabitable. There’s scorching heatwaves, annual tyhpoonic deluges, and snow deep enough to bury a corn silo.

The bad news is planet Earth is the only habitable place we know of in the entire Universe. Also, are the Niburians suffering from Niburian made climate change? Only Niburian Al Gore can answer that question.

We as a species are interested in habitability for an assortment of reasons, political, financial, humanitarian and scientific. We want to understand how our own climate is changing. How we’ll live in the climate of the future and what we can do to stem the tide of what our carbon consumption causes.

There could be agendas to push for cleaner energy sources, or driving politicians towards climate change denial to maintain nefarious financial gain.

We also might need a new lilypad to jump to, assuming we can sort out the travel obstacles. The thing that interests me personally the most is, when can I see an alien?

The habitable zone, also known as the “Goldilocks Zone”, is the region around a star where the average temperature on a planet allows for liquid water with which to make porridge. It’s that liquid water that we hunt for not only for our future uses, but as an indicator of where alien life could be in the Universe.

Problems outside this range are pretty obvious. Too hot, it’s a perpetual steam bath, or it produces separate piles of hydrogen and oxygen. Then your oxygen combines with carbon to form carbon dioxide, and then hydrogen just buggers off into space.

This is what happened with Venus. If the planet’s too cold, then bodies of water are solid skating rinks. There could be pockets of liquid water deep beneath the icy surface, but overall, they’re bad places to live.

We’ve got this on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The habitable zone is a rough measurement. It’s a place where liquid water might exist.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a simple equation of the distance to the star versus the amount of energy output. The atmosphere of the planet matters a lot. In fact, both Venus and Mars are considered to be within the Solar System’s habitable zone.

Venusian atmosphere is so thick with carbon dioxide that it traps energy from the Sun and creates an inhospitable oven of heat that would quickboil any life faster than you can say “pass the garlic butter”.

It’s the opposite on Mars. The thin atmosphere won’t trap any heat at all, so the planet is bun-chillingly cold. Upgrade the atmospheres of either planet and you could get worlds which would be perfectly reasonable to live on. Maybe if we could bash them together and we could spill the atmosphere of one onto the other? Tell Blackbolt to ring up Franklin Richards, I have an idea!

When we look at other worlds in the Milky Way and wonder if they have life, it’s not enough to just check to see if they’re in the habitable zone. We need to know what shape their atmosphere is in.

Astronomers have actually discovered planets located in the habitable zones around other stars, but from what we can tell, they’re probably not places you’d want to live. They’re all orbiting red dwarf stars.

It doesn’t sound too bad to live in a red tinted landscape, provided it came with an Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack, red dwarf stars are extremely violent in their youth. They blast out enormous solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These would scour the surface of any planets caught orbiting them close enough for liquid water to be present.

There is some hope. After a few hundred million years of high activity, these red dwarf stars settle down and sip away at their fuel reserves of hydrogen for potentially trillions of years. If life can hold on long enough to get through the early stages, it might have a long existence ahead of it.

When you’re thinking about a new home among the stars, or trying to seek out new life in the Universe, look for planets in the habitable zone.

As we’ve seen, it’s only a rough guideline. You probably want to check out the place first and make sure it’s truly liveable before you commit to a timeshare condo around Gliese 581.

[zealandia]

Venus is controversial. Some sources claim that Venus is not within the Habitable Zone of the Solar System.

[JamesVincex]

We talk about the "Habitable zone" like the human being life standards are the only standards in which living things thrive. The things we know about life are, biological entities need lubrication of some kind to stave off dehydration, they need to be within temperature ranges that suit their thresholds and they typically need fuel and nutrition. Our human standards suggest that hydration needs to be water, the temperature needs to be between 0c and 45c and the nutrition needs to be in the form of meat and vegetables. But that all supposes a carbon based life form, doesn't take into consideration geothermic energy and terraforming. In a seemingly infinite universe is it possible that there are life forms less fragile than ours? That hydrate in other ways? And have evolved in a way that they seek alternative fuel sources or they may have eliminated the need for food all together?

[cityman]

Scientists who shop for a new planet have a lot of preferences. They think orange K type stars are better than the sun, because they live longer, but are less virulent, therefore better than red dwarfs. They also believe that a super-habitable world would be about twice the Earth's mass, with more oxygen in the atmosphere, and shallower oceans.

If you've read Voyages of the Astronef by George Griffiths, a victorian author who was a non-scientist, his depictions of Ganymede and Venus sound very tempting as far as real estate locations go.

Which estimates of our solar systems habitable zones are most plausibly researched? You are aware that the pessimistic ones say it includes just Earth, whereas the wildly optimistic ones reckon it extends further out than Saturn's orbit, and one, by Zsorn and colleagues, actually sets an extreme hypothetical lower bound that intersects with the outer part of Mercury's elliptical orbit.

[-qs]

Hi, I know I am late but havent we already found out life exists in harshest conditions on earth ( Deep frozen water, nuclear power plant) and yet we hope to find other life in earth like condition (Goldilock Zone ) ?

[livesay]

If you were in a multiple star system, with 5 stars, and there would never be night time and you were outside the “habitable zone” per the earth standard, would the planet still be too cold? I don’t think so. We look at earth as a base of what all worlds should resemble to support life but what we could never imagine is the billions of possibilities of planets and the resiliency of life. If we are living on a planet that has 97% of its life extinct then we can never know what kind of life possibilities there are. Flying pigs with horns and dragon tails.

[davidbackhouse]

I'd like a snowy planet with cool summers and lemonade seas.

[thebritishgeek]

Living on a earth like world with ring around a blue white star would be pretty. Dunno what it would be like though

[gavinperkins]

This may be a dumb question, but I'm going with it a massive object were to suddenly disappear, would it leave a dent in the space that it once occupied? OR, is space elastic like and would return to its original form that it held before the object were present?

I ask because if it were to leave a dent, then as a result it would also leave behind a little bit of gravity.

[jbanerje]

I love the twin peaks pic! I can't wait for the new series!

[swRainbowDash]

Id like a planet that's bigger than Earth, but not too big. Also needs to have bunch of water and an atmosphere similar to Earth's. Also if it orbited a red star it'd be nice.

[smokeymirror]

Here's a question (apologies if you've already answered it): without actually traveling to a planet or moon, how could we actually know if there is life on that planet or moon (or could we)?

[erickutepow]

I’m starting to think the habitual zone is a myth. You said it yourself both Venus and Mars are in the Habitable Zone but one too cold and one too hot due to their respective atmospheres. The moon basically shares the same orbit of Earth but one side is too hot and the other too cold.

So my question is: if liquid water needs a just right atmosphere then what does it matter how far away it is from its respective star?

Furthermore how can we say with any certainty what life needs to exist? We’re judging everything on a sample size of one.

And lastly consider this: the cold porridge was just right for mama bear and the hot was just fine for papa bear.

If there’s any scientist or astrophysicist out there reading this, please tell me why the habitual zone isn’t a myth

[chlipecplusdoo]

Has maybe scientist allready made a some kind of graph that can show how far from star can be habitable zone but in combination with atmospheric pressure ? For example, can there be liquid water on planet far away like Uranus but with high atmospheric pressure ? Sorry for my not perfect English.

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

Could life create its own 'Habitable Zone' by changing the environment and atmosphere of a planet?

[YouT-DJ]

The Golf planet - 72 degrees world-wide with sand, water, grass and trees. Maybe artesian Beer wells?

[BRecon]

Is any one type of star easier to analyze atmospheres of surrounding “earth like” exoplanets? Would it be easier to study the atmospheres of Trappist 1 than a star similar to our sun?

[frog]

hey mrs trenholm if you see this for some reason it’s me keona i’m watching this at home yeehaw

[TsarOfTheStar]

My hometown is downright uninhabitable never mind the weather!

[kaysieauroravulpixviolet]

But it feels to me like we're too set on defining habitable in terms of what life found on earth could survive though. For all we know there could be life forms on other planets incomprehensibly different to anything we could ever imagine. Earth developed and evolved life which was adapted to our environment, however what's to say that elsewhere life could develop adapted to much more "hostile" environments.

[FirefoxisredExplorerisblueGoog]

Perfect climate to live in for me would be: 35-40° latitude, with a climate comparable to Denmark. I guess Japan or East Coast US (around New York) comes closest too that. I live at about 53° latitude and the summer is just too damn hot and days last too damn long. Gimme a colder climate and a more consistent day/night cycle so I may sleep properly throughout the year.

Also, I kinda like 1G so don't change that.