Ravi Kopparapu - July 16, 2015

Habitable Zones and the Occurrence of Potential Habitable Planets in our Galaxy

Identifying habitable (and possibly inhabited) planets around other stars is
one of the greatest goals of ongoing exoplanet surveys. To date, several
terrestrial-size/mass planets have been discovered in the habitable zones (HZs)
of their host stars, from both ground-based surveys and from NASA's Kepler
mission. In this talk, I will discuss the current estimates of the HZs,
focusing on ongoing modeling efforts and implications to observational surveys.
I will also briefly discuss the current knowledge on the occurrence of
potential habitable planets in our galaxy. Current estimates put the fraction
of stars that have at least one terrestrial planet in their HZ  to be ~15%. In
other words, one out of every seven stars in our galaxy may have a potential
habitable planet.