The Diversity of Habitable Zones and Their Planets

The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization is the determination of which planets occupy the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Thanks to increasing orbital period and mass/size sensitivity of both radial velocity and Kepler data, many exoplanets are now known pass through or remain in the HZ, some of which are terrestrial in nature. In this talk I will describe the properties of the HZ, the dependence on the spectral type, and the time dependence that results from binary star systems. I will describe the diversity of exo-planets which are known to occupy the HZ of their stars, including planets in highly eccentric orbits, super-Earths, and potential analogs to the planet Venus.

Speaker: Dr. Stephen Kane, San Francisco State University