Searching for other Earth-like planets

Dynamo Models for Planets Other Than Earth

Observations from planetary spacecraft missions have demonstrated a spectrum of dynamo behaviour in planets. From currently active dynamos, to remanent crustal fields from past dynamo action, to no observed magnetization, the planets and moons in our solar system offer magnetic clues to their interior structure and evolution. Here we review numerical dynamo simulations for planets other than Ea...

The search for Earth-like planets

Improved technology is leading to interesting new findings regarding extrasolar planets. NASA’s current list of exoplanets includes 403 objects. Research efforts including the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP), and Kepler have recently helped discover extrasolar planets that challenge naturalistic origins theories. Great efforts are underway to find exoplanets tha...

Climate variations on Earth-like circumbinary planets

The discovery of planets orbiting double stars at close distances has sparked increasing scientific interest in determining whether Earth-analogues can remain habitable in such environments and how their atmospheric dynamics is influenced by the rapidly changing insolation. In this work we present results of the first three-dimensional numerical experiments of a water-rich planet orbiting a dou...

Climate stability of habitable Earth-like planets

Spectropolarimetric signatures of Earth–like extrasolar planets

We present results of numerical simulations of the flux (irradiance), F, and the degree of polarization (i.e. the ratio of polarized to total flux), P, of light that is reflected by Earth–like extrasolar planets orbiting solar–type stars, as functions of the wavelength (from 0.3 to 1.0 μm, with 0.001 μm spectral resolution) and as functions of the planetary phase angle. We use different surface...