Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-short-options-paper-shared-by-parts-a-and-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2019/s30/1/d/solution

The habitable zone is the range of orbital distances where an appropriate planetary atmosphere could sustain liquid water at the surface; it is not a guarantee of inhabited or even habitable conditions for every planet. At a fixed habitable incident flux, . With the supplied , Kepler's third law gives
Taking Earth as a rough central reference, a star has and days. Its six-day, Earth-sized companion receives about times terrestrial irradiance and could therefore lie in the habitable zone in this simplified model. Atmosphere, stellar activity, tidal locking and volatile retention remain unknown. The six-day companion around the Sun-like star receives about times terrestrial irradiance and is approximately Jupiter-sized; it is not a plausible surface-water Earth analogue. The stellar spectral dependence of actual habitable-zone edges is omitted by the simple scaling.

New to topics? Read the docs here!