Definition
The circumstellar habitable zone (HZ) is the circular region around one or multiple stars where standing bodies of liquid water could exist on a rocky planet’s surface similar to Earth in composition and mass with an atmosphere (e.g., Kasting et al. 1993; Haghighipour and Kaltenegger 2012; Kaltenegger and Haghighipour 2013; Kopparapu et al. 2013) that facilitates the detection of possible atmospheric biosignatures in the atmosphere of such planets (see, e.g., Kaltenegger 2017; Catling et al. 2018; Fujii et al. 2018).
The width and distance of this annulus, using this definition, depend mainly on the stellar luminosity and spectral energy distribution, and change through stellar evolution (Underwood et al. 2003; Lopez et al. 2005; Danchi and Lopez 2013; Ramirez and Kaltenegger 2014, 2016).
A planet in the habitable zone is not necessarily habitable. Multiple mechanisms exist by which a planet cannot attain or can lose habitability, for example, low mass and resulting...
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Further Reading
Barnes R, Mullins K, Goldblatt C, Meadows VS, Kasting JF, Heller R (2013) Tidal Venuses: triggering a climate catastrophe via tidal heating. Astrobiology 13(3):225–250
Domagal-Goldman SD, Segura A (2013) Exoplanet climates. In: Mackwell SJ et al (eds) Comparative climatology of terrestrial planets. University of Arizona, Tucson, pp 121–135. https://doi.org/10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816530595-ch005
Segura A (2018) Star-planet interactions and habitability: radiative effects. In: Deeg HJ, Belmonte JA (eds) Handbook of exoplanets. Springer, Cham, pp 1–23
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Kaltenegger, L., Segura, A. (2023). Habitable Zone. In: Gargaud, M., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65093-6_685
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