Limits of Habitability

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An exoplanet astrophysics group asking what makes a world habitable — and how small a planet can be while still holding liquid surface water. Led by Stanford Science Fellow Michelle Hill, the lab detects and catalogs planets in their stars' habitable zones and models the interior evolution, carbon cycling, and atmosphere retention that decide whether a world can stay alive.

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Feature Episode

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Posted May 25—

1.1 · The Zone

Three rocky planets orbit our Sun in the region where liquid water could exist, but only one of them is alive. For fifty years, astronomers have chased a single elegant idea about what makes a world habitable — a range of distances from a star where the temperature is just right. In this episode, we trace the "habitable zone" from a thought experiment to the calculation that still defines the field today, and find a warning hiding in plain sight. Even the scientists who built the concept knew it wasn't quite the answer everyone thinks it is.