Obliquity Variability of a Rapidly Rotating Early Venus and of the Potentially Habitable Exoplanets Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f
Abstract
Venus currently rotates slowly, with its spin controlled by solid-body and atmospheric thermal tides. However, conditions may have been far different and more amenable to life 4 billion years ago, when the Sun was fainter and most of the carbon within Venus could have been in solid form, allowing for a low-mass atmosphere. Among the best candidates for habitability among known exoplanets are two planets within the optimistic habitable zone of their host star, Kepler-62 that are about 1.5 times the radius of Earth. We use numerical integrations to investigate how the obliquity would have varied on timescales as large as 1 Gyr for a hypothetical rapidly rotating Early Venus and for these two super-Earth size exoplanets.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.P53A2647L
- Keywords:
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- 5210 Planetary atmospheres;
- clouds;
- and hazes;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: ASTROBIOLOGY;
- 6295 Venus;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS;
- 6296 Extra-solar planets;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS