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Gravitational Interactions and Habitability

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Handbook of Exoplanets

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Abstract

Habitable planet properties can be significantly influenced by gravitational interactions with the host star(s), companion planets, and natural satellites. Gravitational perturbations from neighboring planets can modify a planet’s orbital and rotational properties, which are primary drivers of climate and habitability. Planets on tight orbits can experience a tidal deformation due to a large gravitational gradient across their diameters, which cause orbits to shrink and circularize, rotational frequencies to evolve toward the orbital frequency, obliquities to decay to 0 or π, and internal friction that heats the interior. Large natural satellites can overwhelm the rotational perturbations of stars and planets, but they are unstable for habitable planets orbiting stars less than half as massive as our Sun. These gravitational interactions can produce arbitrarily complex evolutionary trajectories, but theoretical models can be applied to almost any system to provide a reasonable representation of a habitable planet’s orbital and rotational history.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astronomy Department, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Rory K. Barnes

  2. Center for Space and Habitability, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Russell Deitrick

Authors
  1. Rory K. Barnes
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  2. Russell Deitrick
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Correspondence to Rory K. Barnes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Hans J. Deeg

  2. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Juan Antonio Belmonte

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Barnes, R.K., Deitrick, R. (2018). Gravitational Interactions and Habitability. In: Deeg, H., Belmonte, J. (eds) Handbook of Exoplanets . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55333-7_90

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