Habitability properties of circumbinary planets

Abstract

It is shown that several habitability conditions (in fact, at least seven such conditions) appear to be fulfilled automatically by circumbinary planets of main-sequence stars (CBP-MS), whereas on Earth these conditions are fulfilled only by chance. Therefore, it looks natural that most of the production of replicating biopolymers in the Galaxy is concentrated on particular classes of CBP-MS, and life on Earth is an outlier, in this sense. In this scenario, Lathe's mechanism for the tidal "chain reaction" abiogenesis on Earth is favored as generic for CBP-MS, due to photo-tidal synchronization inherent to them. Problems with this scenario are discussed in detail.

42 pages. Published in AJ

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk
• Prospects for Life on Temperate Planets Around Brown Dwarfs
• Statistical properties of habitable zones in stellar binary systems
• Earth-size planet formation in the habitable zone of circumbinary stars
• Tidal decay of circumbinary planetary systems
• The Habitable Zone of Kepler-16: Impact of Binarity and Climate Models