The Habitability of Proxima Centauri b: II: Environmental States and Observational Discriminants

Understand

Proxima Centauri b provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand the evolution and nature of terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarfs.

• Although Proxima Cen b orbits within its star's habitable zone, multiple plausible evolutionary paths could have generated different environments that may or may not be habitable.
• Here we use 1D coupled climate-photochemical models to generate self-consistent atmospheres for evolutionary scenarios predicted in our companion paper (Barnes et al., 2016).
• These include high-O2, high-CO2, and more Earth-like atmospheres, with either oxidizing or reducing compositions.