Are there super-habitable planets compared to Earth? - by StartsWithABang
, the evidence is still murky. Here’s the science behind the idea of super-habitability.
In intergalactic gas clouds, in star-forming regions, in outflows from young stars, and in planet-forming disks around those stars, a wide variety of organic molecules continue to be discovered. We assumed, initially, that there would be a habitable zone: a region where a rocky planet with a sufficient atmosphere could maintain liquid water on its surface. We now know that many worldscould possess sub-surface oceans beneath a layer of ice, that exomoons could be habitable through tidal heating by a nearby planet, and that the right atmosphere could render an otherwise cold, barren world hospitable to life.
Neptune-like planets, which have a thick, volatile gas envelope enshrouding their surface that’s at least thousands of Earth-atmospheres thick, which represent practically all of the so-called super-Earths up to planets with about the mass of Saturn. In the meantime, declaring a world to be super-habitable is excruciatingly premature, as our notions of habitability are defined largely by our prejudices, not by data.
The Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the temperature range of each star class shown above it, in kelvin. The overwhelming majority of stars today are M-class stars, with only 1-in-800 being massive enough for a supernova. Only about half of all stars exist in isolation; the other half are bound up in multi-star systems. Earlier on, when there were no heavy elements, virtually all of the stars that formed were O-and-B stars: the hottest, bluest, most massive type..
It’s easy to make grand statements at this point, because we have a total lack of evidence as to what conditions are most conducive to life. These are questions worth thinking about, especially as we start to understand the abundances of planets of specific masses around stars of specific classes, and their distributions in terms of these and other metrics.
The eight most Earth-like worlds, as discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission: the most prolific planet-finding mission to date. All of these planets orbit stars smaller and less bright than the Sun, and all of these planets are larger than Earth, with many of them likely possessing volatile gas envelopes. Although some of them are called super-habitable in the literature, we don’t yet know if any of them have, or ever had, life on them at all.
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