Runaway Greenhouse Effect - Connection To Habitability

Connection To Habitability

The concept of a habitable zone has been used by Planetary scientists and astrobiologists to define an orbital region around a star in which a planet (or moon) can sustain liquid water. Under this definition, the inner edge of the habitable zone (i.e., the closest point to a star that a planet can be until it can no longer sustain liquid water) is determined by the point in which the runaway greenhouse process occurs. For sun-like stars, this inner edge is estimated to reside at roughly 84% the distance from the Earth to the sun although feedbacks such as cloud-induced albedo increase could modify this estimate somewhat.