February 24, 2021 Poster Open Access

HOME: Habitability Of Magnetized Environments

Alvarado-Gómez, Julián D.; Drake, Jeremy J.; Poppenhäger, Katja; Garraffo, Cecilia; Cohen, Ofer; Yadav, Rakesh K.; Fraschetti, Federico; Moschou, Sofia P.

Editor(s)

The stellar magnetic field completely dominates the environment around late-type stars. It is responsible for generating the coronal high-energy radiation (Extreme Ultra-Violet and X-ray photons), the structure and strength of stellar winds, as well as for driving transient phenomena such as flares, coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events. Apart from their direct consequences on the star and its evolution, these phenomena will have strong effects on planetary systems via star-planet interactions and erosion of exoplanetary atmospheres. Understanding the Habitability of Magnetized Environments (HOME) is therefore a fundamental aspect in our search for life-supporting places in the Universe. In this context, the HOME project aims to perform a systematic characterization on how stellar magnetism affects the habitability conditions of exoplanetary systems and determine how such conditions change across spectral type and age. To achieve this objective, HOME employs surface magnetic field distributions of stars, in the form of Zeeman-Doppler Imaging (ZDI) observations and/or from high-end dynamosimulations, to construct physics-based models of the environments around stars and exoplanets. As an example, we summarize a HOME characterization of the Proxima Centauri system in this poster contribution.