Andy Weir's 'Exoplanet' just landed on Audible, but what actually makes an exoplanet habitable?
But behind the extraordinary events of this audio drama is a very real scientific question: what makes a planet habitable?
Key points
- Astronomers use these measurements to determine whether a world lies in the habitable zone of a star, where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on the surface given a suitable atmosphere.
- (Image credit: Audible) A planet that sits comfortably in the habitable zone is ultimately still at the mercy of its star.
- Hostile stars Black holes are bad news for life, but living stars provide just as many problems.
(Image credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech via Wikimedia Commons) Even if a planet has survived all the complications we’ve just thrown at it, there’s still a rather important question: could we actually breathe the air?
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) In “Exoplanet”, the crew view skies that are not only unfamiliar but also seemingly different from one another.
Additional details
- For the stranded crew in “Exoplanet”, understanding the star overhead may therefore be as important as knowing the landscape beneath their feet.
- In "Exoplanet", one crew member discovers that the planet’s atmosphere contains enough oxygen for him to breathe without his spacesuit.
- At high altitudes on Earth, the oxygen percentage remains the same, but the lower pressure means less oxygen is available to our lungs.
- A planet orbiting a cool red dwarf would need to be much closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun to be in this habitable zone.
- NASA illustration of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size planet to be discovered in a habitable zone.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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