A Gaian Habitable Zone
Rudy Arthur, Arwen Nicholson

TL;DR
This paper introduces a simple model demonstrating how life influences planetary climate and extends the habitable zone, supporting the Gaia hypothesis through ecological regulation and ensemble effects.
Contribution
It presents a novel abstract model showing how life can regulate climate and expand habitable zones, incorporating concepts like punctuations and entropic Gaia.
Findings
Life can regulate temperature and extend habitable zones.
Ensemble of systems tends to sustain or improve habitability.
Model predicts the size of habitable zones around stars.
Abstract
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to be influenced by the presence of life. Here using a simple abstract model of `tangled-ecology' where life can influence a global parameter, labelled as temperature, we investigate the boundaries of the habitable zone of our model system. As with other models of life-climate interactions, the species act to regulate the temperature. However, the system can also experience `punctuations', where the system's state jumps between different equilibria. Despite this, an ensemble of systems still tends to sustain or even improve conditions for life on average, a feature we call Entropic Gaia. The mechanism behind this is sequential selection with memory which…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEarth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
