Tides Tighten the Hycean Habitable Zone
Joseph R. Livesey, Juliette Becker, Susanna L. Widicus Weaver

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that tidal heating significantly influences the habitable zone of hycean planets, especially around low-mass stars, by extending the zone due to tidal effects and affecting potential biosphere development.
Contribution
It introduces the impact of star-planet tidal interactions on the habitable zone boundaries of hycean planets, a factor previously overlooked.
Findings
Tidal heating can truncate the habitable zone at larger orbital distances.
Moderate eccentricity in hycean planets is common and affects habitability.
Tidal effects are crucial for future assessments of hycean planet habitability around M dwarfs.
Abstract
Hycean planets -- exoplanets with substantial water ice layers, deep surface oceans, and hydrogen-rich atmospheres -- are thought to be favorable environments for life. Due to a relative paucity of atmospheric greenhouse gases, hycean planets have been thought to have wider habitable zones than Earth-like planets, extending down to a few times 0.001 au for those orbiting M dwarfs. In this Letter, we reconsider the hycean habitable zone accounting for star-planet tidal interaction. We show that for a moderately eccentric hycean planet, the surface temperature contribution from tidal heating truncates the habitable zone at significantly larger orbital radii, and that moderate eccentricity is readily obtained from any massive outer companion in the system. Though few current hycean planet candidates orbit stars of low enough mass for tides to plausibly significantly alter the extent of the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
